Recent research has focused not only on trying to explain the low rate of diffusion and adoption of innovative programs, but also on the lack of use of "knowledge," more broadly defined to include ideas, information, craft skills, materials, experience, and the like. It is widely acknowledged that disproportionally more educational knowledge exists than is put to use. It is also argued that knowledge use in schools is governed by complex interactions of factors associated with the knowledge itself, the users and the disseminators, and the social and organizational context involved. To explore the validity of models for explaining staff use of professional knowledge, the ratings of the utilization impact of 72 workshops by 467 teachers and other participants were regressed on, and correlated with, their background characteristics, personal concerns, and psychological traits; their school characteristics and climate; and alterable features of the workshops. Controlled for the relatively non-alterable variables, knowledge use is significantly associated with school climate variables such as equality of staff treatment, goal direction, and capacity to deal with problems as well as such workshop features as clear advance explanations, job relevance, participant or consultant initiation of workshop, total hours of training, and specific methods of presenting knowledge. (Author/JMK)