Inside IES Research

By Sammi Plourde, NCSER Intern; Kristen Rhoads, NCSER Program Officer; and Becky McGill-Wilkinson, NCER Program Officer

IES-funded research by Dr. Compton and his colleagues was recently awarded the International Literacy Association’s (ILA) Albert J. Harris Award!  ILA is an advocacy organization that publishes current research on literacy and provides resources for practitioners, students, and leaders involved in facilitating literacy development across the world.  The Albert J. Harris Award is given annually to a recently published journal article or monograph that contributes to better understanding of prevention or measurement of learning disabilities or reading disabilities.

The winning article by Jennifer K. Gilbert, Donald L. Compton, Douglas Fuchs, Lynn S. Fuchs, Bobette Bouton, Laura A. Barquero, and Eunsoo Cho entitled “Efficacy of a First-Grade Responsiveness-to-Intervention Prevention Model for Struggling Readers,” features findings from a NCSER-funded measurement study focused on identifying and intervening with struggling readers as early as first grade.  The article describes effects of intensive intervention within a multi-tiered prevention model. Struggling readers who were randomly assigned to receive an intensive, small-group intervention had better reading gains compared to students who received classroom instruction as usual. However, some students continued to struggle despite receiving the intensive intervention.  Those students were then randomly assigned to receive the intensive intervention in a one-on-one format or to continue in a small-group format. Results indicated that no differences in performance existed between the two formats.  They also found that more than half of the students who participated in the intervention failed to achieve average reading scores by the end of third grade.  These findings suggest that students with persistent reading problems need intervention as early as possible that spans multiple years.  They also suggest that instruction for the students should be tailored to meet individual needs.  

Dr. Compton and his colleagues are continuing this research with IES.  They were funded by NCER to conduct a follow-up research study to identify characteristics of children who begin elementary school with typical reading development but are then later identified as having a reading disability. This work will provide information on how to guide instruction for students who have these characteristics.

Congratulations to Dr. Compton and his colleagues for making such an important contribution to identifying, preventing, and treating reading disabilities!

Questions? Comments? Please send them to IESResearch@ed.gov. 

By Katina Stapleton and James Benson, NCER Program Officers

A core problem for research on minority-serving institutions (MSIs) is that they have been defined inconsistently. Through the IES-funded Center for Analysis of Postsecondary Education and Employment (CAPSEE) at Teachers College, Columbia University, researcher Valerie Lundy-Wagner is leading two research projects that aim to provide the definitional and contextual information necessary for carrying out more comprehensive and rigorous research on MSIs and the ethnic/racial and low-income students they disproportionately serve.

We spoke with Valerie about her motivation for studying MSIs and the challenges that face MSI researchers.

How did you become interested in studying minority-serving institutions (MSIs)?

By Erin Higgins, NCER Program Officer

Wait, have I already learned that?  Can I use what I learned in math class to help me solve this physics problem? Students struggle with these types of questions every day – unsure how to identify situations where their knowledge is transferrable. Even when they do recognize opportunities to use knowledge learned in one context in a different situation, they may not apply their knowledge appropriately. This is especially true in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) disciplines. To improve student outcomes in STEM, we need instructional strategies and curricula that help students and teachers with this enduring challenge of transfer.

At the Association for Psychological Science’s 27^th Annual Convention, I put together a symposium that highlighted emerging research that addresses this complex issue. Four researchers funded through NCER’s Cognition and Student Learning topic discussed findings from their ongoing research. Each is approaching this issue from a unique perspective regarding factors that help or hinder transfer, and each is examining this issue with different learning tasks, content areas (science, math) and age groups.

Jennifer Kaminski presented research conducted in collaboration with Vladimir Sloutsky (The Role of External Representations in Learning and Transfer of Mathematical Knowledge) that demonstrates that both undergraduate and elementary students who learned a mathematical concept in a simple symbolic format were more likely to transfer their knowledge than those who learned the concept in a more contextualized and perceptually-rich format. This finding is particularly interesting given the widely-held belief that students learn mathematics concepts better with concrete objects, and suggests that there may be many instances where teaching students in a more abstract way facilitates later transfer. This research team is continuing this line of work in their more recently funded IES grant, Facilitating Transfer of Mathematical Knowledge from Classroom to Real Life.

Charles Kalish presented research with elementary-aged students and adults showing that the structure of the math practice problems students encounter affects the memory representations built in response, which then determines whether students can successfully transfer their knowledge in mathematics (Promoting Discriminative and Generative Learning: Transfer in Arithmetic Problem Solving). For instance, in a study with elementary-aged students, 2^nd graders practiced arithmetic by playing a computer-based ice cream game, where they had to make ice cream flavors for monsters by combining different types of ice cream. Students who received “grounded” practice interacted with the math practice problems in a way that highlighted the underlying quantities in the arithmetic problem while students who received “symbolic” practice were given standard arithmetic problems to solve. Students who received the grounded practice showed higher performance on a later test on arithmetic problems involving quantities not seen during practice. In light of the research presented by Kaminski in this symposium, this research demonstrates that the issue of transfer in mathematics is extremely complex, and it may be the case that there are circumstances where a more concrete, grounded approach to instruction is best and other circumstances where a symbolic, abstract approach will lead to the best transfer.

Kenneth Kurtz presented research on a technique called category construction, which is a sorting task intended to teach students the conceptual principles that underlie different examples of the same science concepts (Enhancing Learning and Transfer of Science Principles via Category Construction).  Compared to students who engaged in the more standard approach of completing worksheets about science concepts, students who engaged in category construction were better able to apply the newly learned science concepts to novel situations.

Finally, Holly Taylor presented research exploring the effects of a spatial thinking program for elementary-aged children on both spatial thinking and STEM performance (An Elementary-age Origami and Pop-up Paper Engineering Curriculum to Promote the 3-D Spatial Thinking and Reasoning Underlying STEM Education).  Based on origami and paper-engineering activities, the program trains 2D to 3D spatial transformation and diagram interpretation skills. This research is ongoing, though preliminary results suggest that students’ spatial reasoning skills are improved when they engage in this program. Future research will evaluate the extent to which this intervention improves STEM achievement.

Together, these four presenters’ lines of research demonstrate the value of applying traditional cognitive psychology and cognitive development theories to challenges in education practice in order to improve education outcomes for students. By aligning instructional approaches to the ways in which the mind works (e.g., by addressing how different memory models affect how we use information, how spatial reasoning impacts math and science problem solving, and how our perceptual system impacts how we represent information in our minds), we can begin to develop approaches that more effectively impart knowledge to students in ways that will allow for the broadest and most successful transfer.

Additional summaries of the research presented at this symposium can be found at: http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2015/06/03/findings-show-ways-students-can-transfer-math.html and http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/inside-school-research/2015/06/sorting_improves_science_transfer.html

Questions? Comments? Please send us an email at IESResearch@ed.gov.

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.