Lyle Spencer Research Awards

Overview

<p>The Lyle Spencer Research Awards Program is intended to support intellectually ambitious research oriented to improving the practice of education, independent of any particular reform agendas or methodological strictures. It supports projects with budgets up to $1 million. In this program, we envision a large-minded 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>We are open to a range of proposals exploring questions, topics, problems, and opportunities that are both interesting and important. We seek studies that look at not only what works but also how, for whom, under what conditions, why, and towards what purposes something works. Such studies might fit—but are not required to fit—within the following three areas.</p> <p>• Studies of instructional practice: studies that focus more or less directly on teaching and learning processes themselves, at the classroom level (or in learning settings outside of classrooms and even beyond schools).</p> <p>• Studies of educational infrastructure: studies that pay attention to the larger policy and institutional environments within which educational transactions take place. Key to our interest here is attention to the conceptual and empirical links between elements of the infrastructure and the actual character of educational practice.</p> <p>• Studies of research infrastructure: studies that help develop research tools that can support advancing the kinds of research we have identified here. This includes the development of improved measurement tools, stronger theoretical frameworks and analytical methods, and the development of new databases and the archiving of databases. While these efforts might not make educational practice better today, we regard advances on these fronts as essential to that lasting improvement in educational research, and ultimately practice, that we seek.</p>