ABSTRACT
The purpose of this chapter is to think carefully about how literacy scholars can conduct useful evaluation studies of literacy interventions. Literacy interventions represent an important class of studies where theory, practice, and policy intersect. The history of evaluation research highlights many issues salient to the study of programmatic interventions. The tensions between the use of evaluation findings to inform local practice versus higher level policy, the difficulties in comparing different approaches to alleviate a problem, and the conflict between the purposes of basic research and evaluation research have been in existence since the first attempts at intervention studies.
