Conference Grants for Advancing Education Research

Overview

<p>We currently seek proposals from scholars whose interests are related to critical questions in the area of measuring educational quality and school improvement. In developing a focused request for proposals about exploring various dimensions of educational quality, the foundation intends to encourage the research community to advance new and innovative research on this topic and to ultimately increase collaboration within the research community. We expect the field to propose research conferences that will spur robust exchanges leading to innovations in measuring educational quality and improvement in not only K-12 contexts, but also in early childhood education, out-of-school time programs, and post-secondary institutions. With the passage of the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), there has been a renewed focus on how public schools assess quality and the key markers for success. Under ESSA, states are now encouraged to move beyond traditional standardized test-based metrics and incorporate nonacademic factors as they determine the best way to measure school quality. This opens up the possibility for schools and districts to explore a range of learning outcomes alongside other measures such as opportunity structures for supporting learning. We are especially interested in proposals that seek to address, in a thoughtful way, equity issues in measuring educational quality. While this conference grant announcement has been inspired by the federal policies governing public K-12 environments, we see questions related to a more expansive articulation of educational quality and improvement as being highly relevant to early childhood as well as higher education.</p> <p>In the context of more expansive notions of educational excellence, this new approach may raise numerous concerns from researchers and practitioners in the field. Issues such as how to accurately measure nonacademic indicators of school performance or how to integrate them into existing metrics might be at the forefront of these concerns. Additional challenges may be related to the contested nature of school accountability and the potential unintended consequences of including nonacademic metrics. Conversely, just as there might be concerns or challenges, there could be great potential for new and promising approaches to emerge that will broaden the education research community’s understanding of educational success. For example, scholars may be studying ways to incorporate nontraditional indicators such as student engagement into state accountability systems as one of many ways to monitor school improvement efforts. Researchers might propose a meeting that invites psychometricians, subject matter content specialists, and scholars who study social-emotional learning to launch a fruitful research agenda aimed at determining promising metrics for documenting school quality. Scholars might also seek opportunities to enhance traditional math and English language arts assessments or to more clearly articulate the role of portfolio assessments or authentic assessments into state level accountability systems. While we have shared here some ideas of possible meetings we want to stress that these examples do not represent the limits of how applicants might approach their own conferences. The Foundation seeks proposals from the educational research community that will address various ways of measuring educational excellence across each sector in an effort to support innovative solutions to the challenges of improving education in early childhood, K-12, out-of-school time learning contexts, and post-secondary education.</p>