An article in the latest edition of the Oxford Review of Education looks at the importance of studying the implementation of interventions in school settings. Implementation matters in terms of putting an intervention into practice. Research studies across multiple disciplines, including education, have consistently demonstrated that interventions are rarely implemented as designed and, crucially, that variability in implementation is related to variability in the achievement of expected outcomes. 

In this article, the authors call for an increasing emphasis on the "often neglected" study of implementation itself, particularly in school settings. They discuss the importance of implementation throughout all the stages of a program's development, from initial testing to widespread dissemination. They argue that, at each stage, studying the way a program is implemented can provide a range of useful information. This includes learning about the likely effectiveness of the program in real-world settings, and learning general lessons about how best to implement change in education.

The subject of implementation fidelity was also covered in a recent article in Better, In Search of Feasible Fidelity by David Andrews, dean of the Johns Hopkins School of Education.