Funding Help

You can either use the information on this page, or you can click on the "Email me details" in the list of office hours for any of the sessions you are interested in. These links have preset subject lines to help ensure your message is processed correctly. After you send the email, you will receive an automated response with the login details, the name and contact information for the session leader(s), and any other details.

Send an email using this link and tell us what accommodation(s) you would like to request (e.g., TTY, ASL, CART) as soon as possible but no later than 48 hours before the session.

These office hours are an opportunity for participants to ask questions regarding the Request for Applications (RFA) and the application process. There will not be a formal presentation from the IES program officers hosting the session. You may join a session at any time and stay as long as you like. Simply log into the meeting using the appropriate link or by phoning in.

These sessions are not recorded. So if you miss a session, we recommend that you click on the "Email me details" link and then scroll to the bottom of the automated response to see the contact information for the session's program officer(s). Then email the program officer(s).

You don't need a Microsoft Teams account to attend the virtual office hours. You can phone in or use the link provided. For information about how to use Microsoft Teams without an account, please refer to Microsoft's documentation.

Educators must often adapt interventions over time because what works for one student may not work for another and what works now for one student may not work in the future for the same student. Adaptive interventions provide education practitioners with a prespecified, systematic, and replicable way of doing this through a sequence of decision rules for whether, how, and when to modify interventions. The sequential, multiple assignment, randomized trial (SMART) is one type of multistage, experimental design that can help education researchers build high-quality adaptive interventions. Despite the critical role adaptive interventions can play in various domains of education, research about adaptive interventions and the use of SMART designs to develop effective adaptive interventions in education is in its infancy. To help the field move forward in this area, the National Center for Special Education Research (NCSER) and the National Center for Education Evaluation and Regional Assistance (NCEE) commissioned a paper by leading experts in adaptive interventions and SMART designs. This paper aims to provide information on building and evaluating high-quality adaptive interventions and review the components of SMART designs, discuss the key features of the SMART, and introduce common research questions for which SMARTs may be appropriate. 

Since the release of the Common Guidelines for Education Research and Development in 2013, there has been increased attention to replication and reproducibility studies and their role in building the evidence base. In response, a joint IES-NSF committee has developed the Companion Guidelines on Replication and Reproducibility in Education Research to supplement the Common Guidelines for Education Research and Development. The Companion Guidelines highlight the importance of replication and reproducibility studies and provides guidance on the steps researchers can take to promote corroboration, ensure the integrity of research, and extend the evidence base. Download a copy of the Companion Guidelines on Replication and Reproducibility in Education Research below:

In August 2013, a Joint Committee of representatives from the U.S. Department of Education (ED) and the National Science Foundation (NSF) released a report that 1) defines the types of ED- and NSF-funded research that relates to the development and testing of interventions and strategies designed to increase learning, and 2) specifies how the types of research relate to one another, and describe the theoretical and empirical basis needed to justify each research type. The Joint Committee intends this report to be a "living document" that may be adapted by agencies or divisions within agencies in response to their needs and opportunities. Over time, the framework may be elaborated or rearranged according to agency focus and assessments of the needs of education researchers and practitioners. Download a copy of the Common Guidelines for Education Research below:

The primary purpose of this paper is to provide suggestions to researchers about ways to present statistical findings about the effects of educational interventions that might make the nature and magnitude of those effects easier to understand. These suggestions and the related discussion are framed within the context of studies that use experimental designs to compare measured outcomes for two groups of participants, one in an intervention condition and the other in a control condition.

The National Center for Education Research (NCER) in the Institute of Education Sciences (IES) of the U.S. Department of Education hosts an annual Summer Research Training Institute on Cluster-Randomized Trials to increase the national capacity of researchers to develop and conduct rigorous evaluations of the effectiveness of education interventions. To see video transcripts and presentation files from the 2008 Institute, click here. For the 2007 Institute presentations, click here.

CONSORT, which stands for Consolidated Standards of Reporting Trials, was developed to provide guidance on the tracking and reporting of critical aspects of randomized controlled trials (RCTs). The main initiative of the CONSORT group was the development of a set of recommendations for reporting RCTs, called the CONSORT Statement. The Statement includes a 22-item checklist, which focuses on study design, analysis, and interpretation of the results, and a flow diagram, which provides a structure for tracking participants at each study stage. IES encourages researchers to use these tools in their Goal 3 and Goal 4 research projects.

http://www.consort-statement.org/

This paper, entitled "Statistical Power Analysis in Education Research" and coauthored by Larry Hedges and Christopher Rhoads provides a guide to calculating statistical power for the complex multilevel designs that are used in most field studies in education research. View, download and print the paper as a PDF file below:

Goal Three and Goal Four applications submitted to IES will typically require a detailed power analysis. The Optimal Design Software for Multi-Level and Longitudinal Research is useful for statistical power analysis of group-level interventions. To download the free Optimal Design software and learn more about the project, click here.

NCEE has formed a technical methods group to work on issues and strategies that assure evaluations of education interventions provide unbiased and causally valid assessments. The technical methods working group aims to advance and provide guidance for those specialists who are embarking on evaluations in education.

This special issue of Child Development Perspectives (December 2008, Volume 2 Issue 3) contains a number of articles on the application of effect sizes in research on children and families.