Carnegie Mellon University Program in Interdisciplinary Education Research (PIER)

Carnegie Mellon established the Program in Interdisciplinary Education Research (PIER) with funding from a 2004 IES grant. With the 2009 grant, PIER continued to train scientists to conduct rigorous research on learning conditions related to curriculum, instruction, and assessment to improve academic outcomes for diverse prekindergarten through postsecondary students. PIER fellows earned an education sciences certificate by fulfilling a set of course and project requirements and conducting a dissertation involving applied research in education, while simultaneously earning a doctorate in one of Carnegie Mellon's participating departments (human computer interaction, economics, machine learning, philosophy, psychology, robotics, and statistics). PIER training focused on skills relevant to IES's development and efficacy goals in the areas of cognition and student learning, math and science education, and educational technology. Training emphasized the use of cognitive modeling, process-tracing tools, and advanced statistical techniques for analyzing complex data sets with an emphasis on causal modeling.