The effectiveness with which research findings are disseminated to policy makers in education, particularly at the state level, is explored in the four chapters of this report. In chapter 1, Linda J. Nelson reviews the literature and determines that policy makers do make important, but indirect, use of research. She suggests that research institutes can adopt a number of strategies to make research more useful. The second chapter, by Eugene Bardach, proposes a theory of how the process of research dissemination works. Bardach argues that the cost of consuming social science research is high while the specificity of the contexts in which the research can be used lowers its average value, especially as compared with research in the natural sciences. Low rates of research use may result more directly from this situation than from problems in dissemination. Chapter 3, by Nelson and Michael W. Kirst, reports on a survey of 266 policy makers in California, Virginia, and Maryland conducted to determine the informational needs and disseminational preferences of educational policy makers at the state level. The final chapter, by Christopher Bellavita, discusses the strategies used for dissemination by information-producing organizations, as well as their recommendations and cautions. (Author/PGD)