The National Academies Press

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Pages 9-26

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From page 9... ... SUMMARY 9 RECOMMENDATION 8.2: IES should review and fund grants more quickly and re-introduce two application cycles per year. The committee thinks that attending to the larger structural issues facing NCER and NCSER (see Recommendations 4.1 and 5.1–5.5) Read the entire page →
From page 10... ... REFERENCE Education Sciences Reform Act (ESRA) Read the entire page →
From page 11... ... , authorizing the creation of the Institute of Education Sciences (IES) as the research, evaluation, statistics, and assessment arm of the Department of Education, and crystallizing the federal government's commitment to providing "national leadership in expanding fundamental knowledge and understanding of education from early childhood through postsecondary study" (ESRA, 2002) Read the entire page →
From page 12... ... Such an examination can ensure that IES-funded research moves the field forward on issues that are of critical importance to education and special education policy and practice and that improve learner outcomes. STUDY SCOPE AND APPROACH In response to a request from the Institute of Education Sciences, the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine through its Board on Science Education convened the Committee on the Future of Education Research at the Institute of Education Sciences to provide guidance on the future of education research at the National Center for Education Research (NCER) Read the entire page →
From page 13... ... Given this focus, a committee was assembled with expertise in the four primary elements of the charge. The committee members have a broad range of expertise including education policy, methods in education research, education leadership, education technology, cognition and student learning, training in education research, social-emotional learning, and early learning. Read the entire page →
From page 14... ... However, as the committee describes throughout this report, a contemporary understanding of how evidence is used by education stakeholders demands that knowledge mobilization become integrated into the work of researchers from the outset, and so these considerations are within the bounds of this committee's work. The second issue is the review processes that govern who receives grants from NCER and NCSER. Read the entire page →
From page 15... ... Along those same lines, the committee interpreted the statement of task's four bullets as the primary tasks relevant to our work, and for this reason, focused on the research centers' activities that have direct bearing on future investments in critical problems or issues, new approaches or methods, training, and organization of RFAs. As described in Chapter 3, NCER and NCSER support research activities across multiple grant competitions, ranging from annual Education Research and Methods grant competitions to funding for Research and Development centers and Research Networks. Read the entire page →
From page 16... ... The committee was not asked to conduct original research or evaluations on how well IES is meeting its stated mandates: Indeed, the committee was directed to focus its energies on the future rather than perseverate over past events. When determining conclusions and formulating recommendations, the committee relied on our professional expertise to interpret multiple kinds of evidence: documents and information provided by IES staff, the five commissioned background papers, and oral testimony regarding the state of education research in the United States, as well as committee members' own experiences as producers and consumers of education research. Read the entire page →
From page 17... ... In doing so, the committee considered how that education landscape has changed since the founding of IES and whether these changes might have consequences for how NCER and NCSER should operate. The committee also considered how the advances in education research generated by IES's investments to date should inform a renewed set of priorities for the agency. Read the entire page →
From page 18... ... These issues and other pandemic-related concerns will necessarily be of paramount importance as the nation continues to battle the pandemic. In recognizing that education research can and should play a pivotal role in helping schools and communities address these critical questions, the committee has considered its work and framed its recommendations with the understanding that the aftershocks of the COVID-19 pandemic will bear on the research community for generations to come. Read the entire page →
From page 19... ... use and usefulness of education research, (4) heterogeneity in education, and (5) Read the entire page →
From page 20... ... was more than double that for White children. Moreover, Black children (12%) Read the entire page →
From page 21... ... In the committee's view, educational inequity is one of the paramount challenges facing education researchers, and often the problems that IES and education research broadly are trying address are fundamentally problems of equity. When ESRA mandates that NCER ensure that its funded work is in service of "ensur[ing] Read the entire page →
From page 22... ... The EO directs several federal actors to take actions to rectify past inequities and also advance a formal equity agenda in all future work. Of note, the EO directs the heads of all agencies to "assess whether underserved communities and their members face systemic barriers in accessing benefits and opportunities" in their respective programs, and to produce a plan for addressing these barriers. Read the entire page →
From page 23... ... In sum, the attention to equity issues laid out in both ESRA and Executive Order 13985 is rooted in a wealth of education research that posits that attending to equity is a necessary condition for ensuring that education in the United States lives up to its promise. For these reasons, the committee has used equity in education as a crosscutting theme throughout this report. Read the entire page →
From page 24... ... Use and Usefulness of Education Research A major goal of IES, as outlined in ESRA, is to facilitate the use of evidence to inform education. The very structure of IES is designed to identify and promote effective approaches that have robust, scientific evidence Read the entire page →
From page 25... ... Ensuring that the problems being addressed in education research are meaningful and important to educators and education decision makers is a key challenge. This has been particularly evident during the pandemic when schools sought guidance on how to best support students' learning during the crisis, and the education research community had difficulty both identifying existing studies that could provide guidance and mounting new research that could be completed and acted upon in a timely way. Read the entire page →
From page 26... ... However, over the past 20 years, there is mounting evidence that treatment effects vary, sometimes substantially (Weiss et al., 2017) Read the entire page →

From page 9...

... SUMMARY 9 RECOMMENDATION 8.2: IES should review and fund grants more quickly and re-introduce two application cycles per year. The committee thinks that attending to the larger structural issues facing NCER and NCSER (see Recommendations 4.1 and 5.1–5.5)