William T. Grant Scholars Program 2017

Overview

<p>The William T. Grant Scholars Program supports career development for promising earlycareer researchers. The program funds five-year research and mentoring plans that significantly expand junior researchers’ expertise in new disciplines, methods, and content areas. This award includes a mentoring component, as well as an emphasis on community and collaboration. Scholars Program applicants should have a track record of conducting high-quality research and an interest in pursuing a significant shift in their trajectories as researchers. Proposed research plans must address questions of policy and practice that are relevant to the Foundation’s focus areas. Focus areas include U.S. based research of youth ages 5 to 25 that increases our understanding of: • programs, policies, and practices that reduce inequality in youth outcomes, and • strategies to improve the use of research evidence in ways that benefit youth. The William T. Grant Scholars Program seeks research that builds stronger theory and empirical evidence in these two areas. To propose research on reducing inequality, applicants should:<br>1. Clearly identify the dimension(s) of inequality to be studied (e.g., race, ethnicity, economic standing, and/or immigrant origins).<br>2. Make a case for the importance of the dimension(s) of inequality.<br>3. Specify the youth outcome(s) to be studied (e.g., academic, social, behavioral, and/or economic).<br>4. Show that the outcomes are currently unequal. As the Foundation commits to renewed interest in this area, we shift our focus from understanding how and under what conditions research is used to understanding how to create those conditions. Our renewed focus includes:<br>• Investigations to identify, create, and test the structural and social conditions that foster more routine and constructive uses of existing research evidence.<br>• Studies to identify, create, and test the incentives, structures, and relationships that facilitate the production of new research evidence that responds to decision makers’ needs.<br>• Studies that investigate whether and under what conditions using high quality research evidence improves decision making and youth outcomes.</p>