May 2025

The 2025 AERA Annual Meeting featured 18 invited sessions in the Research and Science Policy Forum, which included conversations with education research leaders and discussions on emerging education research issues and priorities. Established in 2003 by AERA Executive Director Felice Levine and approved as an integral part of the program, this annual series engages meeting attendees in important issues at the intersection of education research and science policy.

One focus of this year’s forum was the response to the current uncertainty regarding federal research and science policy and funding. One session, “Perspectives, Priority Setting, and the Role of Private Foundations in the Current Climate,” included insights from philanthropic leaders Kent McGuire (Hewlett Foundation), Gisele C. Shorter (Nellie Mae Foundation), and Na’ilah Suad Nasir (Spencer Foundation). This session was complemented by one focusing on early career fellowships and funding opportunities from non-federal sources.

Another session, “The Perspectives of Deans on Navigating Graduate Student and Early Career Trajectories in Troubling Times,” offered an opportunity for graduate students to share feedback on considerations for their career trajectories at the current moment. It featured a discussion with members of the executive committee of the AERA Consortium of University and Research Institutions (AERA-CURI). A third session featured prominent education reporters highlighting how to communicate education research in challenging times.

Standards Session

Two sessions focused on the current work to update Standards for Educational and Psychological Testing, led by members of the Joint Committee for the Revision of the Standards, working under the aegis of the Standards Management Committee. In addition, several sessions featured discussion and reflection on recent external reports informing education research in the present emerging landscape:

• From the Spencer Foundation: forthcoming report from the Task Force on the Preparation for Transformative Research
• From the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, five reports:
  • A New Vision for High Quality Preschool Curriculum
  • K–12 STEM Education and Workforce Development in Rural Areas
  • Scaling and Sustaining Pre-K–12 STEM Education Innovations: Systemic Challenges, Systemic Responses
  • Equity in K–12 STEM Education: Framing Decisions for the Future
  • Transforming Undergraduate STEM Education: Supporting Equitable and Effective Teaching
• From the National Academy of Education: commissioned paper series on addressing educational inequities in the wake of COVID-19
• From the American Association for the Advancement of Science: Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity (SOGI) Data at U.S. Colleges and Universities: A Mixed-Methods National Study

A New Vision for High Quality Preschool Curriculum	Scaling and Sustaining Pre-K–12 STEM Education Innovations: Systemic Challenges, Systemic Responses

See the AERA website for additional information on all of the Forum sessions.

Co-sponsored by the Research and Science Policy Forum were four sessions that comprised the AERA Honorary President Edmund W. Gordon Series. Topics included an examination of the most critical axiological challenges facing education research; how post–White-oriented, intergenerational dialogue might (re)organize, (re)energize, and guide the field toward a 21st-century research commons; educational assessment in the service of teaching and learning; and the continued disparate health outcomes that Black male youth face and interconnected outcomes in education. Additional details on these sessions are also available on the AERA website.