IES Blog

By Lauren Musu-Gillette

It is important for all students to feel safe at their schools and on their campuses. As one way to gauge the safety of college campuses, the Jeanne Clery Disclosure of Campus Security Police and Campus Crime Statistics Act, known as the Clery Act, requires colleges participating in Title IV student financial aid programs to report certain data on campus crime. Since 1999, data on campus safety and security have been reported by institutions through the Campus Safety and Security Survey. Types of on-campus crime that institutions are required to report include: burglaries; forcible sex offenses; motor vehicle thefts; and aggravated assaults. Additionally, a 2008 amendment to the Clery Act requires institutions to report data on hate crime incidents on campus.

Overall, reports of crime on college campuses have decreased in recent years. In 2012, there were 29,500 criminal incidents against persons and property on campus at public and private 2-year and 4-year postsecondary institutions that were reported to police and security agencies, representing a 4 percent decrease from 2011. Looking at on-campus crime patterns over a longer period, the overall number of crimes reported between 2001 and 2012 decreased by 29 percent.

In terms of specific crimes, the number of on-campus crimes reported in 2012 was lower than in 2001 for every category except forcible sex offenses. The number of reported forcible sex crimes on campus increased from 2,200 in 2001 to 3,900 in 2012 (a 77 percent increase). More recently, the number of reported forcible sex crimes increased from 3,400 in 2011 to 3,900 in 2012 (a 15 percent increase). It is important to keep in mind that data are available only for reported crimes. Thus, the increase could reflect an actual increase in the number of forcible sex crimes, or an increase in the number of people who report the crime when it occurs.

Hate crime reports are relatively rare among the more than 4,700 campuses offering 2- and 4-year programs. In 2012, there were 791 reported hate crime incidents that occurred on the campuses of these public and private 2-year and 4-year institutions. For the three most common types of hate crimes reported in 2012 (vandalism, intimidation, and simple assault), the most frequent category of bias associated with these crimes was race, and the second most frequent was sexual orientation.

The video below presents some additional information about crime and safety on college campuses:

For more information, see Indicators of School Crime and Safety: 2014.

By Emily Doolittle, NCER Program Officer

About 12 million students are educated in rural settings in the United States. Teaching and learning in these settings generates unique challenges, both for the schools operating in rural areas and for the researchers who want to learn more about rural schools and their needs. Recognizing this, NCER has made targeted investments in rural education research through two of its National Education Research and Development (R&D) Centers.

The National Research Center on Rural Education Support focused on the educational challenges created by limited resources in rural settings, such as attracting and retaining appropriately and highly qualified teachers and providing them with high-quality professional development. Specific projects included:

• The Targeted Reading Intervention (TRI) program, which seeks to help rural teachers, who often work in isolation, turn struggling early readers (kindergarten and 1st grade) into fluent ones. Using a laptop and a webcam, a TRI Consultant supports the classroom teacher as they provide diagnostically-driven instruction in one-on-one sessions.
• The Rural Early Adolescent Learning Program (REAL) professional development model, which helps teachers consider the academic, behavioral, and social difficulties that together contribute to school failure and dropout for adolescent students. Accordingly, REAL is designed to provide teachers with strategies to help students make a successful transition into middle school.
• The Rural Distance Learning and Technology Program, which examined the role of distance in advanced level courses for students and professional development for teachers; and
• The Rural High School Aspirations Study (RHSA), which examined rural high school students’ postsecondary aspirations and preparatory planning.

The National Center for Research on Rural Education (R²Ed) examined ways to design and deliver teacher professional development to improve instruction and support student achievement in reading and science in rural schools through three projects:

• The Teachers Speak Survey Study investigated (1) variations in existing rural professional development (PD) experiences; (2) differences in PD practices between rural and non-rural settings; and (3) the potential influence of PD characteristics on teacher knowledge, perceptions, and practices in one of four instructional content areas: reading, mathematics, science inquiry, or using data-based decision making to inform reading instruction/intervention.
• Project READERS evaluated the impact of distance-provided coaching on (1) teachers' use of differentiated reading instruction following a response-to-intervention (RTI) model and (2) their students' acquisition of reading skills in early elementary school.
• Coaching Science Inquiry (CSI) evaluated the impact of professional development with distance-provided coaching for teaching science using explicit instruction with guided inquiry and scaffolding on teacher instructional practice and science achievement in middle and high school.

R²Ed also conducted two related sets of studies.

• The first set explored ecological influences and supports that may augment educational interventions and outcomes in rural schools. The goal of this work is to understand contextual influences of rurality and how they interact to influence parent engagement in education and child cognitive and social-behavioral outcomes.  
• The second set explored methodological and statistical solutions to challenges associated with the conduct of rigorous experimental research in rural schools.

As R²Ed completes its work, NCER is considering how to support rural education research going forward. As a first step, we hosted a technical working group meeting in December 2014 to identify research objectives of importance to rural schools and to reflect on the success of the R&D Center model to advance our understanding of rural education. A summary of the meeting is available here on the IES website.  The ideas shared during this meeting will help guide future IES investments in rural education research.  

Please send any comments or questions to IESResearch@ed.gov.

By Tom Brock, NCER Commissioner

If you are a subscriber to the IES Newsflash, you have seen a series of announcements of our FY 2015 research grant and training awards. It is a banner year, with 117 new research and training grants being made. As shown in Figure 1, the new grants include 81 Education Research grants (84.305A), eight new training grants (84.305B), two Research and Development Centers (84.305C), 12 Education Statistics and Research Methodology grants, and 14 Partnerships and Collaborations Focused on Problems of Practice or Policy grants (84.305H). This is the largest number of awards NCER has made in several years.

Figure 1. FY 2015 NCER Research and Research Training Awards

Why so many new awards? In part, it is because we had many strong applications this year, as determined through our peer review process. It is also because there is a natural ebb-and-flow in the proportion of our budget that is available for new awards. In years when many older grants are ending – such as FY 2015 – we have more money to make new awards; in years when many older grants are continuing, we have less money for new awards. This trend is illustrated in Figure 2.

Figure 2. NCER Grant Funding: FY 2012 - FY 2017 (Estimated)

Unfortunately, the positive funding picture for FY 2015 has negative implications for FY 2016. The large number of new awards we are making this year will limit the amount of money we have for new awards next year. Indeed, we estimate that we will have only about 1/3 the funding for new awards in FY 2016 that we have in FY 2015. This is because a higher proportion of our budget will go toward continuation costs.

In anticipation of next year’s limited funds, we have established funding priorities and taken steps to contain expenditures for new awards in FY 2016. Our priorities emerged from discussions with the National Board of Education Sciences, and from input we received from technical working group meetings with education researchers and practitioners and the public. Below is a summary of the programs NCER will be competing and the steps we have taken to limit costs:

• We are inviting applications for our Education Research Grants program (84.305A), which supports a wide variety of field-initiated research projects in 10 different topic areas. For the first time, however, we are restricting applications to four research goals: Exploration (Goal 1), Efficacy and Replication (Goal 3), Effectiveness (Goal 4), and Measurement (Goal 5). We are not inviting Development and Innovation (or “Goal 2”) applications, mainly because our Education Research Grant portfolio is already heavily weighted toward these projects. We also reduced the maximum amount of funding available for each of the research goals. For example, we reduced the maximum award for an Exploration project using secondary data from $800,000 to $700,000, and the maximum award for an Efficacy study from $3.5 million to $3.3 million. We did not reduce any maximum award by more than $200,000.
• We are launching a new training program called Pathways to the Education Sciences (84.305B), which Katina Stapleton described in a June 4 blog. The Pathways program is the only training program we are competing in FY 2016; we are not inviting new proposals for pre- or post-doctoral training, or for methods training. We expect to make up to four awards for the Pathways program.
• We are requesting applications for a Research and Development (R&D) Center on Virtual Learning (84.305C), which will support efforts by researchers to conduct rapid cycle experiments to improve widely-used education technologies in the K-12 sector. The Center will also explore how the large amounts of data generated by education technologies may be used to support meaningful improvements in classroom teaching and student learning. The Virtual Learning R&D Center was competed in FY 2015, but no application received a high enough score to justify an award. We expect to make one grant in FY 2016.
• We are inviting applications for our Statistics and Research Methodology in Education program (84.305D), which is intended to produce statistical and methodological tools that will better enable education scientists to conduct rigorous education research. For FY 2016, we are limiting applications to Early Career researchers who are within five years of earning their PhDs. We will make up to four awards.
• We are requesting applications for our Researcher/Practitioner Partnership program (84.305H), which provides funding for researchers and practitioners to work together on an education problem or issue that practitioners identify as a priority. We are not inviting applicationsfor the Continuous Improvement Research in Education program, in part so we can learn from recent grants under this topic. Nor are we inviting applications for the Evaluation of State and Local Programs and Policies program. For FY 2016, we will make up to five awards for Researcher/Practitioner partnerships.
• We are launching a new program called Research Networks Focused on Critical Problems of Education Policy and Practice (84.305N), which I described in a blog post on May 27. For FY 2016, we are requesting applications from researchers who are interested in forming networks on two topics: (1) Supporting Early Learning from Preschool Through Early Elementary School Grades (Early Learning Network); and (2) Scalable Strategies to Support College Completion (College Completion Network).

We are hopeful that the funding limitations we have imposed on many of our programs are temporary. If you are applying for an education research or training grant in FY 2016, make sure you read the Request for Applications (RFA) carefully to make sure your proposed project and budget fall within the application guidelines. If our overall grants budget stays level, we anticipate somewhat greater capacity to make new awards in FY 2017.

Please send any comments or questions to us at IESResearch@ed.gov. 

By Liz Albro, NCER Associate Commissioner of Teaching and Learning

Welcome to our second “Month in Review” post! In addition to writing blogs, both NCER and NCSER have been busy making new awards this month, and preparing abstracts describing our newly funded projects published on our website. 

New Research Awards

Across the two research centers, IES awarded 148 new discretionary grants to support research and research training activities. I hope that you will take the time to dip into our abstracts describing the individual projects. From early childhood to postsecondary, from basic cognitive science to system-level analysis, from exploration to impact, the projects reflect the wide scope of education research questions that the IES research centers support. To learn more about the awards, click here to read about the new NCSER awards, and here for information about the new NCER awards. Be sure to check back on Monday, July 6^th, to read a new blog from Commissioner Brock discussing the 2015 awards and the forecast for 2016.

IES Funded Research in the News

Research findings from the Cognition and Student Learning portfolio were featured in two EdWeek articles in June. These articles describe some of the exciting work being done to address long-standing questions of transferring knowledge learned in one class or context to support new learning in mathematics  and science.

The ED/IES Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) portfolio was featured in three different articles in June! Read more about how games developed with SBIR funding are being used to teach students about a wide variety of topics, like algebra, environmental science, and social skills.

IES Staff Presentations

On June 16-17, NCSER co-sponsored a Technical Working Group Meeting with the Department of Education’s Office of Special Education Programs (OSEP) and Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD) on Evidence-Based and Emerging Practices: State of Science and Practice for Children with Disabilities.  The meeting was an important opportunity for leaders in the field of special education to share what has been learned across a number of pivotal areas in research and practice and also to identify some promising next steps. A synthesis of the meeting is underway and will be available later this year.

ED/IES SBIR program officer Ed Metz participated in the National SBIR Conference, and led a panel on games for learning.

Applying for IES Research Funding This Summer? Missed Our Webinars?

No problem. PowerPoint presentations and transcripts from the webinars led by our program officers are available on our website. Click here to access information about preparing grant applications for IES.