In this Fiscal Year (FY) 2025 request for applications (RFA), NCEE is establishing the Building Evidence of Effectiveness of Strategies to Increase Postsecondary Student Success Network (SPEC-PS). We are seeking up to 5 research teams to join this new Network.
This competition has three purposes:
- First, the program seeks to build the capacity of state higher education agency (or equivalent), college, and university employees to rigorously evaluate postsecondary student success interventions in a manner consistent with IES’s What Works Clearinghouse™ evaluation standards.
- Second, as a result of successfully completed grantee evaluations, the program seeks to build high quality evidence about the effectiveness of postsecondary student success interventions that have been deployed at scale (that is, at more than one Title IV participating institution within or across states).
- Finally, the program seeks to widely share what was learned in individual grantee evaluations, so that effective strategies can be scaled by other States and institutional grantees of HEA-authorized programs; and also how those evaluations were successfully conducted, so that others may design and execute their own high-quality evaluations of postsecondary student success programs.
