Action research, a deliberate, solution-oriented form of investigation that can bridge existing gaps between formal research and practice (Mills, 2003) will be applied by a team of investigators from Fairbanks and the Center of Excellence in Leadership of Learning (CELL) at the University of Indianapolis to address behavior and learning needs of substance-impacted (SI) and similarly at-risk elementary age students. Many of these children have been negatively impacted by parental substance abuse in utero, by adult substance-abuse in their homes or communities, and/or sometimes by their own use of substances.

Presently, educators are in need of research supported, practical, effective classroom strategies and methods to help these students overcome their behavior and learning problems. To address this situation, Fairbanks and CELL will collaborate with local educators to develop and test interventive means to assist these children in having a successful school experience. The objective of this work is to develop best practices for educators.

This fall, a Fairbanks-CELL field team led by the SI-Children and the School project's clinical director, Dr. Sigurd H. Zielke, will begin work on a three year, two phase best practice development project. The first phase, benchwork, involves the application and testing of various identified strategies and methods through an action research model of inquiry. Action research uses "spiraling cycles" of problem definition and mapping; targeted initial interventions; systematic data collection regarding the impact of the initial interventions; reflection and analysis of collected data; followed by analysis-driven adjustments to the original interventions, and so on, until a desired result is found and can be replicated. This first phase will conclude with the Fairbanks-CELL team carefully analyzing the findings to isolate the most efficacious forms of the various interventions applied-these then will be given a preliminary, first phase designation of practices of promise.

Before practices of promise can be deemed best practices, a second phase must follow. Practices of promise must be put through field trials at various school sites so they can be tested within wider populations of substance-impacted and similarly at-risk children. In this phase, practices of promise will be applied by educators to address the varied learning and school behavior problems of these children. Practices which demonstrate statistically strong and reliable helping outcomes will then be deemed best practices, and will serve as the curricular content for the training of elementary school teachers, administrators and counselors. Bottom line, the goal of the project is to produce research-based and informed strategies and methods that will enable educators to have a more positive impact on the school performance of SI and similarly at-risk children.