Advancing High-Quality Research to Improve Education Policy and Practice

Equity in Math Education Research Grants

Deadline: September 28, 2023

Dissertation Fellowship

Deadline: October 5, 2023

Postdoctoral Fellowship

Deadline: November 15, 2023

Evaluating and Improving Teacher Preparation Programs

The Academy has undertaken a three-year study funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation focused on evaluating and improving teacher preparation programs. The project aims to identify best practices among existing models of evaluation tools and provide recommendations for developing new models. Under the direction of an interdisciplinary steering committee of researchers and practitioners in teacher education, the project outcomes will be made applicable and accessible to different stakeholders, including state and federal agencies, teacher preparation programs, practitioners, and researchers.

Educating for Civic Reasoning and Discourse

Funded by the Hewlett Foundation, this NAEd initiative aims to improve student learning in civic reasoning and discourse by ensuring that the best available evidence informs the pedagogy, curriculum, and learning environments they experience. The project includes a workshop, commissioned chapters, and a summary report synthesizing findings and actionable guidance for policymakers and practitioners.

Study on the Implementation and Use of Balanced Assessment Systems

The NAEd recently received a grant from Smarter Balanced/University of California Santa Cruz to guide state and local educational agencies to (1) design policy, professional learning, and other local systems necessary to implement balanced assessment systems; (2) foster and maintain a culture of data literacy to appropriately and effectively use the data from a balanced assessment system, as well as additional critical contextual information, to improve teaching and learning; and (3) implement a system to use the data to improve the assessment system continually.

Addressing Educational Inequities in the Wake of the COVID-19 Pandemic

The Academy received a two-year grant from the William T. Grant Foundation to sustain and advance the NAEd’s work and commitment to addressing the educational inequities resulting from and exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic. Guided by an interdisciplinary committee of NAEd scholars and policy leaders, this project will provide promising intervention strategies for improving student well-being and learning outcomes for disproportionately affected historically marginalized populations.

This grant builds on the successful NAEd project, COVID-19 and Educational Inequities, which began in May 2020 and provided needed research-based evidence on specific policy and practice challenges in areas including student well-being, reading, mathematics, assessment, and institutional change.