An effort is made to present a model of the R&D process which is comprehensive enough to handle the full range of events and activities which take place within it, including evaluation, and which has compatability at both macrostructural and microstructural levels of analyses. The first part of the paper focuses on the R&D process. An overview is presented of the federal R&D effort in education as it is accomplished through the labs and R&D centers and the scope of activities undertaken in one of these institutions. One of the chronic problems of evaluation, the degree of fidelity in the implementation of planned intervention is presented, and some procedures for dealing with the problem are explicated. The second part of the paper focuses on the products that emerge from the R&D process, a process conceived to be a mapping from the precise definition or characterization of a product at one stage into the definition of a product at a later stage. The minimal definitions or characterizations of products at the basic and applied research stage, the development stage, and the utilization stage are discussed for the physical sciences, and for the social and behavioral sciences by means of a series of three-dimensional minimal definition matrices. The paper concludes with a discussion of the evaluation of the federal R&D effort at the federal level. (Author/CK)