Serious challenges require serious scholarship: Integrating implementation science into the scholarly discourse

•Implementation science is identified as a key contribution of this special issue.•Implications for theory, practice, dissemination, and preparation are identified.•The scholarship of implementation should be integrated into educational psychology.

The articles in this special issue illustrate the challenges of implementing interventions in school contexts, as well as the lessons that can be learned from such work. Being responsive to the challenges and affordances of educational contexts requires studying not just the treatment, but also what happens before, during, and after implementation. Scholarship on implementation science and curricular design can be productively integrated into intervention development and research, as the authors in this special issue have shown. Gathering data regarding the entirety of the intervention implementation can result in powerful lessons for the field, but researchers, and journal editors, must apply the same standards of rigor for reporting implementation fidelity as they do for reporting psychometrics or statistical analyses. As this special issue shows, when the field of educational psychology takes seriously the scholarship of implementation, the result is positive implications for theory, practice, and the preparation of future scholars.