March 2023

AERA has announced 10 recipients of its dissertation and research grant awards. Grant recipients are studying salient issues in STEM education and policy as well as topics related to student school experiences, school leadership, and education outcomes. The recipients are selected through and supported by the AERA-NSF Grants Program, which has been funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) since 1990.

These scholars are using federal data sets such as the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study, the National Household Education Survey, the U.S. Census, and the Common Core Data, as well as State Longitudinal Administrative Data systems (SLDS) data from New Jersey, New York, Tennessee, and Texas. These studies use rigorous quantitative methods and advanced statistical techniques to examine topics and issues in education research.

The dissertation grants provide advanced graduate students with $27,500 for one year as they write up their research, and early career scholars up to $35,000 for a two-year study. In addition to the funding, scholars participate in professional development and training activities aimed at building their research capacity and encouraging the use of large-scale data in education research.

The NSF has funded the Grants Program for over three decades in support of AERA’s efforts to enhance the visibility and use of large-scale designed and administrative data through dissertation and research grants and statistical institutes aimed at building research capacity. Over 600 graduate students and early career scholars have received these grants as they launched their careers and developed their research agendas in STEM education research.

“The AERA-NSF Grants Program continues to provide extraordinary training and support for new scholars using large-scale designed and administrative data to study STEM and other education research topics,” said Barbara Schneider (Michigan State University), chair of the program’s governing board. “We are eager for these scholars to implement their proposed studies, analyze their data, and generate findings and results that will inform STEM education and policy.”

Several current and former AERA-NSF Grants Program grantees will present their research in poster sessions during the 2023 AERA Annual Meeting in Chicago. Dissertation grantees will present in the session Promising Scholarship in Education Research: Dissertation Fellows and Their Research, on Friday, April 14, from 11:40 a.m. to 1:10 p.m. The research grantees will present in the session Excellence in Education Research: Early Career Scholars and Their Work, on Saturday, April 16, from 11:40 a.m. to 1:10 p.m. Both sessions will be held in the Hyatt Regency Chicago/Riverside West Exhibition Hall. The poster presentations will also be available in the AERA iPresentation Gallery.

For more information about the Grants Program visit the AERA website. The next proposal deadline for dissertation and research grants will be this fall.

AERA Grants Dissertation Grantees
Recipient		Project Title
	Fabian Barch New York University	Estimating the Effects of Homelessness on Student Learning Outcomes
	Lauren Covelli   Vanderbilt University	ACT Testing Policy in Tennessee: Effects on Test-Taking, Scores, and College Enrollment
	Megumi Hine Johns Hopkins University	Examining School Opportunities for Family Engagement
	Hannah Kistler Vanderbilt University	Principal Attributes and Teachers’ Returns to Experience
	Matthew Lenard Harvard University	The Impacts of High School Industry Certifications: Regression Discontinuity Evidence

AERA Grants Research Grantees
Recipient		Project Title
	Vandeen Campbell Rutgers University, Newark	What Science Course Sequences in High School Affect College-Level Science Pathways? Variations by School Segregation in New Jersey
	Joel Mittleman University of Notre Dame	Advancing a “Gender Predictive” Approach to Educational Inequality
	Sonyia Richardson University of North Carolina at Charlotte	Missing Out: Examining the Effects of School Absences on End of Year Assessments in Mathematics and Science
	John Williams III Texas A&M University at College Station	A multiyear statewide investigation on the effects of Texas students’ disciplinary outcomes and end of course assessments for mathematics and science
	Susu Zhang     University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign	Revision and review behavior in large-scale computer-based assessments: An analysis of NAEP mathematics process data