Education Research Grant Program

Overview

<p>Through its National Center for Education Research (NCER), the Institute of Education Sciences (IES) supports a sustained program of research to build knowledge and understanding of education practice and policy. The program’s four intended outcomes are<br>1. Improved access to a high-quality education for all learners from early childhood through adulthood, particularly those at risk of failure<br>2. Improved academic achievement for all learners from early childhood through adulthood, particularly those at risk of failure<br>3. Reduced opportunity and achievement gaps between high-performing and low-performing learners<br>4. Improved access to, persistence in, progress through, and successful completion of postsecondary education</p> <p><strong>Requirements</strong></p> <p><br> </p><div style="padding-left:30px"><strong>1. Education Outcomes and Topics:</strong></div> <div style="padding-left:60px">Academic Outcomes – Required for All Applications</div> <div style="padding-left:60px">Educator Outcomes – Required for Effective Instruction Applications</div> <div style="padding-left:60px">Social and Behavioral Competencies – Required for Social and Behavioral Context for Academic Learning Applications</div> <div style="padding-left:60px">Employment and Earnings Outcomes – As Appropriate</div> <div style="padding-left:30px"></div> <div style="padding-left:30px"><strong>2. Education Settings:</strong> Proposed research must be relevant to education in the United States and must address factors under the control of U.S. education systems.</div> <div style="padding-left:30px"></div> <div style="padding-left:30px"><strong>3. Project Types:</strong><strong></strong></div> <div style="padding-left:60px"><strong>Measurement</strong>: Measurement supports both the development and validation of new or modified instruments for use by educators or education researchers. Some Measurement projects will result in instruments that have been validated for use with specific populations in specific contexts to support education practice and policy. Other Measurement projects will result in instruments for use by education researchers. Both types of instruments are needed to ensure that high-quality measurement tools are available to support rigorous exploratory, development, and efficacy research.<br><strong></strong></div> <div style="padding-left:60px"></div> <div style="padding-left:60px"><strong>Exploration</strong>: Exploration supports projects that identify relationships between learner-, educator-, school-, and policy-level characteristics and meaningful education outcomes (see <a href="https://ies.ed.gov/seer/">https://ies.ed.gov/seer/</a&gt;). Findings from Exploration projects point out potentially fruitful areas for further investigation from researchers, policymakers, and practitioners, rather than providing strong evidence for adopting specific interventions or measurement tools. Exploration projects should inform future work to determine what works, for whom, and under what conditions.<br><strong></strong></div> <div style="padding-left:60px"></div> <div style="padding-left:60px"><strong>Development and Innovation</strong>: Development and Innovation supports the development and pilot testing of new or modified education interventions that are intended to produce beneficial impacts on learner outcomes.<br><strong></strong></div> <div style="padding-left:60px"></div> <div style="padding-left:60px"><strong>Initial Efficacy and Follow-Up</strong>: Initial Efficacy and Follow-Up supports initial efficacy studies of education interventions predicted to have a meaningful effect on important education outcomes using designs that meet the IES What Works Clearinghouse (WWC) design standards5 (<a href="https://ies.ed.gov/ncee/wwc/Handbooks">https://ies.ed.gov/ncee/wwc/Hand…;) and longer term follow-up studies of rigorously evaluated interventions. Initial Efficacy projects test interventions that have not been rigorously evaluated previously to examine the intervention’s beneficial impact on education outcomes in comparison to an alternative practice, program, or policy. Follow-Up projects test the longer term impact of an intervention that has been shown to have beneficial impacts on education outcomes in a previous or ongoing evaluation study. Initial Efficacy and Follow-Up projects should provide practical information about the benefits and costs of specific interventions to inform the intervention’s theory of change, its implementation, its usefulness, and its contribution to future research.<br>IES is interested in studies of interventions that can reasonably be expected to have meaningful effects on important education outcomes. IES expects applicants to describe and justify the effect sizes that they anticipate for the interventions they propose to evaluate.<strong><br></strong></div> <div style="padding-left:30px"></div> <div style="padding-left:30px"><strong>4. Dissemination History and Plan:</strong> IES requires all applicants to present a plan to disseminate project findings so that the findings make meaningful contributions to education policy and practice. In addition, applicants are asked to describe their dissemination history to demonstrate their ability and capacity to disseminate research findings to a range of audiences, including educators, policymakers, parents, and the general public.</div> <div style="padding-left:30px"></div> <div><strong>Topics</strong></div> <div style="padding-left:30px"><strong>For the FY 2021 Education Research Grants program, you must submit to one of the 11 topics:</strong></div> <ol> <li>Career and Technical Education</li> <li>Civics Education and Social Studies (new)</li> <li>Cognition and Student Learning</li> <li>Early Learning Programs and Policies</li> <li>Effective Instruction</li> <li>English Learners</li> <li>Improving Education Systems</li> <li>Literacy (Previously Reading and Writing)</li> <li>Postsecondary and Adult Education</li> <li>Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) Education</li> <li>Social and Behavioral Context for Academic Learning</li> </ol>