IES Blog

Institute of Education Sciences

IES at the AERA Annual Meeting

By Dana Tofig, Communications Director, IES

The American Educational Research Association (AERA) will hold its annual meeting April 27 through May 1 in San Antonio, Texas. This is one of the nation’s largest educational research conferences and the Institute of Education Sciences (IES) will be well represented.

More than 100 sessions at the AERA meeting will feature IES staff or work supported by IES. Below is a brief overview, including links to lists of sessions. You can also follow us on Twitter and Facebook to read our #AERA17 posts. 

IES Staff at AERA

IES staff will participate in 20 different presentations, symposia, roundtables, and professional development sessions during the conference, providing information and insight about the wide range of work that we do.

One highlight will be on Sunday, April 30, 10:35 a.m. CT), during a session entitled Research Statistics, and Data: The Vital Role of the Institute of Education Sciences in Retrospect and Prospect. At the session, Thomas Brock, Commissioner of the National Center for Education Research (delegated the duties of IES director), and Peggy Carr, Acting Commissioner of the National Center for Education Statistics, will be a part of a panel that will discuss the work IES has done over the past 15 years and what the work looks like going forward. They will be joined by other researchers and experts, including Northwestern University’s Larry Hedges, currently the Chair of the National Board for Education Sciences. This session will can be viewed for free via livestream, but you must register in advance.

Other presentations led by or featuring IES staff include sessions about funding opportunities and how to write an application for an IES grant; accessing and using data from NCES and the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP); understanding and using international education data, including assessment results; and conversations about different data collections, including race and gender diversity, school-level finance, socioeconomic status and more.

Click here to see a full list of IES staff presentations at AERA.

IES-funded Work at AERA

More than 80 sessions at AERA will feature research and programs that were supported by IES grants and other funding sources. These presentations will cover a wide range of topics, from early childhood education to K-12 to postsecondary opportunities and beyond.

Many of our grantees will present findings from IES-funded research, including the results of IES Research and Development Centers, such as the National Center for Research on Gifted Education, the Center on Scaling Up Effective Schools, the Center for the Study of Adult Literacy, and the Center on Standards, Alignment, Instruction, and Learning.

IES-funded grants will be featured at several other sessions, including eight presentations that will present findings from our Cognition and Student Learning grant program, which builds understanding of how the mind works to inform and improve education practice in reading, writing, mathematics, science, and study skills.

In addition, researchers from several of the Regional Educational Laboratories will present findings on a variety of topics, including early education quality, English learners, teacher evaluations and mobility, college readiness, virtual learning, and much more. 

Also, the National Center for Research in Policy and Practice, an IES-funded Knowledge Utilization Center, will hold several sessions about what they have learned about how educators and policy makers access and use evidence in their decision making.

Click here to see a list of presentations on IES-funded research and programs. 

 

#IES2016: The IES Year in Review

By Ruth Curran Neild, Delegated Director, IES

2016 was a busy year for the Institute of Education Sciences (IES) as we continued our commitment to support a culture of evidence-use in education. Among our work over the past 12 months:

  • We released more than 200 publications, including statistical reports and data collections, research findings and compendia, program evaluations, intervention reports, educator’s practice guides  and more;
  • We made significant improvements to our communications and dissemination efforts, including a new IES website, an improved What Works Clearinghouse site, videos about our work and the launch of IES and NCES Facebook pages. We also published 80 blogs focused on our work and our mission;  
  • We launched tools, like RCT-YES and  Find What Works, that make it easier to conduct, report, and find research;
  • We awarded more than $200 million in research grants and funding across a wide variety of topics, including:
    • More than $150 million in grants from the National Center for Education Research;
    • More than $70 million in grants from the National Center for Special Education Research; and
    • About $5.75 million in funding for the development of education technology through the ED/IES Small Business Innovation Research program.

At the end of the year, we shared a small portion of our 2016 work on Twitter using the hashtag #IES2016. If you weren’t following Twitter over the holidays, we created a Storify of those tweets, which we’ve embedded below.  Also, check out the What Works Clearinghouse (WWC) Year in Review website for an overview of the WWC’s work in 2016.

 

 

Persistence Pays Off: Introducing the New WWC Website

By Ruth Curran Neild, Delegated Director, IES

Stick with it, teachers tell their students.  Don’t give up when the going gets tough. Important work is often difficult. Keep at it.

More than a decade ago, it took this kind of dogged determination to launch an entity that would review education research against rigorous standards—the What Works Clearinghouse (WWC).   There were some skeptics, but also many supporters. And year after year, the WWC persisted, building out new topic areas, adding systematic reviews and practice guides, and identifying more interventions with positive effects on student outcomes.

Over time, WWC standards began to influence the field, with researchers designing studies that would meet its rigorous expectations. At the same time, researchers provided input that helped us improve WWC and its standards. Now, there are about 1,000 effectiveness studies available that meet our high bar for research design.  

By 2014, there was so much content in the WWC and so many people using the WWC website that it was time to retool our online presence and make our resources easier to find.

So IES staff and WWC contractors undertook an extensive project to create a more flexible database and intuitive search engine that meets a variety of user needs. A new relational database was built from the ground up, using study review data previously kept in thousands of different spreadsheets. Focus groups and user testing allowed us to identify the most important functionalities and best design features.

After more than two years of work, we launched the new WWC website today (Sept. 13), with a much-improved Find What Works feature that makes it easier to identify interventions, programs, and policies have improved student outcomes. (The video below can help you learn how to navigate the new site). The new WWC site has something for all types of users:

Do you want just top-level information about a program’s effects?  We can give you that.

Do you want to dig into the details of a particular study, including outcome domains, population, geographic context, and implementation?  We can give you that, too.

Do you want a quick assessment of whether a study was conducted with students like yours?  Find What Works can do that.

Do you want an easy way to compare the research on interventions?  Yes, absolutely – that’s a new feature.  

Do you want to see a list of randomized controlled trials (RCTs) that meet WWC standards and found at least one statistically significant positive effect?  No problem.

This is a proud day indeed for the What Works Clearinghouse, but there’s more to come.  We are always working on new resources for our users. In the next few months, look for a new practice guide on teaching writing in grades 6-12, as well as online WWC reviewer training, which we hope will help to meet the high demand for this credential. And we are continuing to expand our topic areas, including reviews of studies of postsecondary education programs to identify those that are showing promise for improving student outcomes.  

A lot of hard work and persistence went into this project from many people, including IES staff and the teams from Mathematica Policy Research and Sanametrix that worked on the site. I want to say “thank you” to them all. I also want to thank the many people who have been a part of the WWC over the years; including IES team members, study reviewers, and contractors. They have helped get us to this point today.  

Most of all, I want to thank the hundreds of thousands of educators, researchers, and decision makers who visit and use the WWC each year. We are glad that the What Works Clearinghouse has been a part of your work and hope it will continue to be a go-to resource for many years to come. 

 

Spend Five Minutes Getting to Know IES

By Dana Tofig, Communications Director, IES
 
At the Institute of Education Sciences, we sometimes describe ourselves as the country’s “engine” that powers high-quality education statistics, research, and evaluation, or as the “infrastructure” that supports a steady supply of scientific evidence in education.  
 
But many users of IES resources are familiar with just a small slice of what we sponsor to provide quality evidence in education and support for its use across the country. While they may have heard of the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), the What Works Clearinghouse, or the ERIC database of research, studies, and periodicals, they may not know that all those programs, and many more, are housed under one roof at IES. 
 
To help people better understand our work and see how it is connected, we have developed a new video that gives an overview of IES and the six broad types of work that we do.  The video runs just under five minutes, so it doesn’t touch on everything, but it does give a good introduction to IES and our work to connect research to practice. 
 

Please share the video with friends and colleagues who might be interested in the work of IES. In the coming months, we will release additional videos that delve further into each of our focus areas.
 
This video is part of our ongoing efforts to ramp up our communication and dissemination efforts, including the launch of a new, mobile friendly website design and an IES Facebook page where you can get information about the latest reports, resources, and grant opportunities. In the fall, IES will also launch a new What Works Clearinghouse website, which will include an improved "Find What Works" tool. This will make it easier for educators to search for and compare the research about the effectiveness of interventions in education.
 
We are here to serve the public – and we always want to get better at what we do! If you have thoughts or ideas for how we can improve our communication and dissemination efforts, please send an email to dana.tofig@ed.gov.

Renovating Our Home: The New IES Website

By Ruth Curran Neild, delegated director, IES

When you invite people into your home, you want everything to look nice. You clean up, organize, and do anything you can to make sure everyone has a pleasant experience. Now, imagine inviting millions of people into your home.

That is essentially what IES does every year with its website—we welcome millions of people to our online home so they can find the information, tools, and resources they want and need. A few years ago, we recognized that our home wasn’t the most welcoming place – and we decided to do something about it. Our users said the website was very text heavy and almost impossible to use on a mobile device, which is how an increasing number of users are visiting. And they said the way our site was organized made it hard for users to find what they were looking for and see the connections among our work.

Today, I am proud to announce that our home renovation has begun as we launch the first phase of a major website redesign that uses a more attractive, contemporary design, is mobile-friendly, and is better organized, including a new drop down navigation menu that makes it easier for our users to find what they are looking for.

The first phase updates our five top-level pages—the IES home page (pictured) and the landing pages for our four centers: the National Center for Education Research (NCER), the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), the National Center for Education Evaluation and Regional Assistance (NCEE); and the National Center for Special Education Research (NCSER). For a comparison, here's a screenshot of the old website.

To develop the design of the new website, we spoke to focus groups of users, looked at data and analytics, and studied trends in web design. We think the result is a vast improvement over the previous site, and it will only get better over time. In the coming weeks and months we will update other pages, such as our Standards and Review Office, research programs, evaluation studies, the National Library of Education, and more.

To improve the user experience, we also will develop some new pages and content demonstrating the connection and continuity of the work that IES is doing. These include:

  • Topic pages: These pages will bring together a broad array of research, evaluation, and statistics around a specific topic, such as early childhood education and high school graduation;
  • A communications hub: A site where all of the latest IES news, press releases, and blogs will be hosted and easy to find; and
  • An improved training site and events calendar: Information that better displays and tracks training opportunities and events.

Anyone who has been involved in a website redesign knows it is not easy. While only a handful of pages have launched today, it took a long time and a lot of effort to get to this point. I want to thank the many IES staff members and contractors who have developed and built our new site and congratulate them on a job well done. It will take us a while to fully update the website since it contains thousands and thousands of pages.

And, as with any new website, there may be some hiccups that will require further tweaking. If you see anything on our site that needs attention, please email us at Contact.IES@ed.gov and include a link to the content.

The new website is an important part of our overall efforts to improve our dissemination of the research, resources, and tools we support and develop. As I wrote in a recent piece on the Evidence Speaks website, progress is being made in this area, but we still have a lot of work to do before research is used on an everyday basis in the classroom and on campuses. In the coming months, IES will continue to make improvements to our online presences and outreach:

  • In May, we will launch an IES Facebook page to better engage our community and share the work of IES on social media (UPDATE: The Facebook page has launched). We have already made improvements to our social media outreach on Twitter, and have added about 1,000 followers to the @IESResearch twitter feed this year, alone;
  • In the fall, we will unveil a major redesign of the What Works Clearinghouse website and significant improvements to the Find What Works tool so it is easier to locate interventions and programs that make a difference; and
  • Early next year, we expect to launch a major overhaul of the Regional Educational Laboratory (REL) websites to align with the start of the new REL contracts. The RELs are our primary dissemination network, and over the past five years have undertaken many new strategies for connecting research to policy and practice. The new REL contracts and website will further advance that work.

If you have other ideas for dissemination or outreach, please share them with us. We are always trying to improve. You can email our Communications Director, Dana Tofig, at dana.tofig@ed.gov

UPDATED May 13, 2016 to reflect the launch of the IES Facebook page.