The National Academy of Education is dedicated to advancing high quality research to improve education policy and practice. The Research Advisory Committee (RAC), charged with setting the research agenda for the organization, is instrumental in identifying and developing new research program ideas, and in providing guidance to projects in their early stages of development.

Please contact Amy Berman for research initiative inquiries.

Current Initiatives

In the midst of the devastating COVID-19 pandemic, the National Academy of Education (NAEd) is convening groups of scholars, policy leaders, and educators to address the fundamental challenge of our time: how do we address educational inequities in the face of the COVID-19 emergency, a challenge made even more urgent in the context of the resurgent American crisis of racial justice. The NAEd steering committee drafted a summary report based on a series of roundtables and is hosting a series of public forums to discuss possible strategies to address educational inequities during the pandemic in areas including student well-being, reading, mathematics, and institutional change.

Evaluating and Improving Teacher Preparation Programs

The NAEd has undertaken a three-year study funded by the Gates Foundation focused on the evaluation and improvement of teacher preparation programs. The project aims to identify best practices among existing models of evaluation tools and provide recommendations for the development of 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.

Reaping the Rewards of the IES Reading for Understanding (RfU) Initiative

This NAEd report synthesizes findings from scholarship conducted over the past decade as part of a large-scale federal investment by the U.S. Institute of Education Sciences (IES) to improve reading comprehension of U.S. students. To support this undertaking, IES launched the Reading for Understanding Initiative, which invested approximately $120 million in grant funding to six research teams charged with focusing on improving reading comprehension for students in pre-K through grade 12. This initiative responded to concern that children’s improvement in reading comprehension had leveled off over the previous few decades, coupled with the observation that research on reading comprehension had sufficiently matured to warrant a major investment in leveraging that research to improve student performance.

Study on Comparability of Large-Scale Educational Assessments

This NAEd volume provides guidance to key stakeholders on how to accurately report and interpret comparability assertions concerning large-scale educational assessments as well as how to ensure greater comparability by paying close attention to key aspects of assessment design, content, and procedures. The goal of the volume is to provide guidance to relevant state-level educational assessment and accountability decision makers, leaders, and coordinators; consortia members; technical advisors; vendors; and the educational measurement community regarding how much and what types of variation in assessment content and procedures can be allowed, while still maintaining comparability across jurisdictions and student populations. At the same time, the larger takeaways from this volume will hopefully provide guidance to policy makers using assessment data to enact legislation and regulations and to district- and school-level leadership to determine resource allocations, and also provide greater contextual understanding for those in the media using test scores to make comparability determinations.

The Role of Education Research and Practice in Civic Discourse and Reasoning

Funded by the Hewlett Foundation, the NAEd recently launched a new initiative to improve students’ learning in civic reasoning and discourse by ensuring that the pedagogy, curriculum, and learning environments that they experience are informed by the best available evidence. The project will include a workshop, commissioned papers, and summary report that provides a synthesis of findings as well as actionable guidance for policy makers and practitioners.

The steering committee is led by chair Carol Lee and comprised of James Banks, Sarah Freedman, Diana Hess, Joseph Kahne, Peter Levine, Na’ilah Suad Nasir, Walter Parker, and Judith Torney-Purta.

Based on the current state of research in the field and potential for new interdisciplinary linkages, seven working panels will each examine a specific theme, including: (1) psychological foundations (covering identity, human development, implicit bias); (2) history of education for democratic citizenship; (3) philosophical foundations and moral reasoning; (4) ecological context; (5) learning environment, school climate, and other supports for civic engagement; (6) pedagogical practices and how teachers learn; and (7) digital literacy and the health of democratic practice.