The Interagency Education Research Initiative (IERI) is a collaborative effort sponsored by the Institute of Education Sciences in the U.S. Department of Education, the National Science Foundation, and the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, National Institutes of Health. For fiscal year 2003, the Institute of Education Sciences is managing the competition for IERI grants on behalf of all three agencies.
To support the mission of IERI, the Institute of Education Sciences invites applications for research projects that will investigate the large-scale effectiveness of interventions designed to improve student learning and achievement in reading, mathematics, and the sciences. The goal of the Interagency Education Research Initiative is to support scientific research that investigates the effectiveness of educational interventions in reading, mathematics, and the sciences as they are implemented in varied school settings with diverse student populations.
From an empirical perspective, the aim of IERI is to identify conditions under which effective evidence-based interventions to improve preK-12 student learning and achievement succeed when applied on a large scale. Research of this kind requires investigators to integrate an understanding of the predictors of learning outcomes related to specific educational interventions with a rigorous analysis of the logistical, organizational, political, and economic factors that facilitate or impede the implementation of the interventions in varied school settings. Research on scaling up also requires that collaborative arrangements with significant numbers of schools, school districts, and or states support the intent to execute and study the wide-scale implementation of a given intervention. Recognizing that particular areas of research will differ in their readiness for scaling up, IERI invites prospective grantees to submit proposals in one of two categories. Phase I awards provide investigators with an opportunity to prepare for broad scale-up. Phase II awards are for projects that are fully prepared to study the effectiveness of an intervention as implemented in significant numbers of varied educational settings. Phase I and Phase II awards must draw on interventions that have already established evidence of effectiveness.
