Lyle Spencer Awards to Transform Education

Overview

<p>The Lyle Spencer Research Awards Program supports intellectually ambitious research projects oriented to improving the practice of education with budgets between $525,00 and $1 million and durations of up to five years. In this program, we envision a broad conception of educational practice that encompasses formal and informal learning as well as the institutional, policy, and normative frameworks that influence and are influenced by learning and developmental processes. Moreover, we recognize learning occurs across settings—from the classroom to the workplace and even onto the playing field—any of which may, in the right circumstance, provide the basis for rewarding study.</p> <p>This focus on the centrality of a clearly articulated commitment to lasting improvement is what distinguishes the Lyle Spencer Awards from our other research award programs. Through this program, we hope to engage the research community in thinking big: to do work that is thoughtful, critical of prevailing assumptions, self-critical about the work and its limitations, and relevant to the aim of building knowledge for the “lasting improvement in education” that our founder Lyle Spencer challenged his foundation to promote.</p> <p>We are open to a range of proposals exploring questions, topics, problems, and opportunities that are both interesting and important. Hallmarks of the research we seek to fund include conceptual and empirical attention to educational practice and a determination to approach research with well-reasoned and constructive skepticism toward the unexamined assumptions that shape current beliefs, actions, and research agendas. We value work that fosters creative and open-minded scholarship, engages in deep inquiry, and examines robust questions related to education. To this end, this program supports proposals with multiple disciplinary and methodological perspectives, both domestically and internationally, and work that stretches beyond existing research silos.</p>