New IES Award Establishes the National Research Center on Advanced Education

In September 2025, IES awarded a new grant to Jonathan Plucker (Johns Hopkins University) to support the National Research Center on Advanced Education (NRCAE), fulfilling a critical requirement for the Jacob K. Javits Gifted and Talented Students Education Program.* This new Research and Development Center is focusing on advanced education policy and practice issues identified as priorities by three state education agency (SEA) partners—North Carolina, New Jersey, and Nebraska. Advanced education focuses on students who are learning above grade level and those who have the potential to work at those advanced levels. Relevant programs include not only traditional gifted education, but also AP and International Baccalaureate programs, summer and after-school academic programs, and early college entrance.

The NRCAE priorities include the impact of accelerated/advanced automatic enrollment policies and differentiated instruction on student outcomes, associations between teacher qualifications and student advanced achievement, and teachers’ differentiating up for gifted students in mixed-ability classrooms. As part of its research and national leadership activities, NRCAE will also develop a series of toolkits to provide evidence-based guidance on improving advanced education identification and differentiation, create guides to available data to inform education decision-making, and train early career researchers. NRCAE is a collaboration among Johns Hopkins University, three additional research institutions (American Institutes for Research, Texas A&M University, University of Calgary), and the three SEAs. For this blog, IES interviewed NRCAE’s principal investigator, Dr. Plucker.

Why is it important to improve advanced education practice and policy for gifted and higher achieving students?

Research suggests that a surprisingly large percentage of our K-12 students would benefit from advanced education services, perhaps a quarter or more of students. Yet in many states and communities, research-supported services are provided to very few students, sometimes less than 2%! Everyone benefits when students get the opportunity to develop their talents—the students, their families, and their communities. 

I believe there is also a general bias against advanced education in American K-12 schools and educator preparation programs. I find that these biases are rooted in 1970s and 1980s views of gifted education programs, when that generally meant pull-out enrichment experiences for students identified as gifted. Researchers know a lot more today about how to deliver effective, efficient, and accessible services to students; in essence, how to get more students performing at advanced levels. 

What motivated you to be interested in research on advanced/gifted education? 

I was personally frustrated at the deficit focus in much of K-12 education. Make no mistake, helping a below-average reader get up to grade level in their reading ability, for example, is an ethical responsibility that we all share. But what if that child has the talent to go far beyond grade-level proficiency? I encountered too many situations in which getting students even close to grade level was considered the finish line, when it would have been better seen as a milepost on a much longer – and more helpful – journey. As an elementary school science teacher, this phenomenon of “close-to-proficient is a victory” had an especially negative impact on my twice-exceptional students. Those students, who had significant strengths yet struggled with specific disabilities, would often receive special education services to address their disabilities, but they rarely had access to advanced education services that would have helped them develop their strengths. Put differently, helping one of my dyslexic students approach grade-level proficiency in reading was not controversial; providing opportunities to develop his amazing spatial abilities was a non-starter.  

I believe that we can meet the academic needs of all students in our schools, from those struggling to reach proficiency to those working well beyond their grade level. We can do two hard things at once!

Will your project include twice-exceptional students?  

Helping twice-exceptional students thrive is a major focus in the field of advanced education, and it is always among the top parent concerns. Although the center doesn’t have research targeted specifically on these students, twice-exceptional content will be woven throughout our research and supplementary activities. Our hope is that the center’s work will provide parents and educators with guidance and insight they are currently lacking. 

What are you most excited about accomplishing with this new R&D Center?

It would be easier to share what we’re not excited about! But seriously, our team has so much energy and enthusiasm to help the country move forward in important and exciting ways. Although we know so much more about advanced learning than people realize, many critical questions remain unanswered: What are the medium- and long-term effects of promising interventions such as automatic enrollment? How can teachers be better supported as they attempt to “differentiate up” to meet students’ advanced learning needs? How are current policy levers working to promote advanced education, and how can they be improved? Working with our partner institutions to answer these questions is a great opportunity. It’s also important to note that the center’s participating states of Nebraska, New Jersey, and North Carolina are truly partners in this research. The co-PIs from these SEAs were instrumental in identifying the key questions the center will address in our initial wave of studies, and their experience and creativity are proving to be major assets as the entire team moves forward. They are helping us find ways to meet various state needs so that, ultimately, the center can provide assistance to all states.  

Speaking of automatic enrollment policies, it is a major focus of the proposed work. What is the significance of automatic enrollment policies for students? 

Automatic enrollment (AE) is a straightforward idea: If a student performs at advanced levels in a given content area in one grade, they are automatically placed in an advanced course in the same content area the following year. This is often not how it works in our schools, where a variety of factors are used to make course placement decisions—or, perhaps worse, students and their families need to opt into the advanced options. We’re finding advanced course placement jumps significantly in states that have implemented AE policies and early evidence suggests that student performance increases as a result, but we need more research on student outcomes. We also need to know more about implementation, such as why some districts are able to implement AE quickly and successfully while similar districts in the same state struggle to do so.

What are your hopes for the broader impact of this work on education policy and practice?

Conducting high-quality, high-impact research will always be the center’s main objective, but we are also focused on getting that research into the hands of policymakers, practitioners, and families. With this in mind, we are planning a number of supplementary and dissemination activities that should help people understand and use the vast pool of studies that have occurred in recent years. As I often say, I could understand a principal or policymaker saying, “We don’t know how to best help bright students” 15-20 years ago. They would have been wrong, but the field hadn’t done a great job of translating our research into practice. Today that statement is inexcusable: We have a lot of high-quality, field-based studies that have helped us understand how to promote advanced learning in a variety of settings. Getting that usable, practical information to educators, parents, and policymakers is something the center team thinks about every day.

What advice do you have for students and early career investigators who are interested in learning more about conducting research in the field of advanced/gifted education? 

Researchers interested in advanced education are a relatively small but energetic and welcoming group. The American Educational Research Association special interest group (AERA SIG) on Research on the Gifted and Talented and the National Association of Gifted Children (NAGC) Research and Evaluation network are great places to find these colleagues. Both organizations have active and supportive student groups. Of course, anyone interested in this work should feel free to contact our center, where we can provide research opportunities and connect you with researchers interested in similar topics.

Dr. Jonathan Plucker, the PI for NRCAE, is a professor at the Johns Hopkins School of Education and a nationally recognized scholar in talent development and creativity.