October 2022

AERA has announced 15 recipients of its Dissertation and Research Grant Awards. Grant recipients are studying salient issues in STEM education and policy as well as topics in early childhood development, teacher and student school experiences, and outcomes of education policies and practices. 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 Early Childhood Longitudinal Study, the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), the High School Longitudinal Study, and the U.S. Census, as well as Statewide Longitudinal Data Systems (SLDS) data from California, Tennessee, and Texas. These studies use rigorous quantitative methods and advanced statistical techniques to examine topics and issues in education research.

Dissertation grants provide advanced graduate students with $27,500 for one year as they write up their research, and early career scholars with 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 effort 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 provides outstanding training and support for graduate students and early career researchers using large-scale 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 these data, and generate findings and results that will undoubtedly inform STEM education and STEM policy.”

Current and former AERA-NSF Grants Program grantees will present their research in poster sessions during the 2023 AERA Annual Meeting in Chicago. For more information about the Grants Program visit the AERA website. The next proposal deadline for Dissertation and Research Grants is January 10, 2023. The tables below list the Dissertation and Research Grant recipients who have recently commenced their awards.

Dissertation Grantees
Recipient	Project Title
Sarah Asson Pennsylvania State University	Rezoning Educational Opportunities: Measuring the Relationship Between School Attendance Zone Boundary Changes and Patterns of Racial Segregation and Educational Inequality in the D.C. Metropolitan Area
Daman Chhikara Michigan State University	Impact of Student-Teacher Relationships and Race-Match on Absenteeism
Heather Daniels University of California–Merced	STEM Pathways: Availability, Representation, and College Credit Earned in Advanced Math and Science Courses During High School
Auburn Jimenez University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign	A General Ordinal Diagnostic Model for Item- and Category-Level Inferences Using a Polya-Gamma Data Augmentation Strategy
Jake Winfield Temple University	Hiding in Plain Sight: A QuantCrit, Intersectional Analysis of Dual Enrollment

 

Research Grantees
Recipient	Project Title
Catherine Asher University of Michigan	Institute for Social Research Impacts of Grade Retention for English Learners in North Carolina
Jenna Finch University of Nebraska–Lincoln	All in a Day’s Work: The Effects of Daily School Experiences on Children’s Executive Function Skills
Garret Hall and Qian Zhang Florida State University	Who Implements Response to Intervention (RTI) in Math, and Does RTI Benefit Math Achievement? K-Fold Cross-Validation and Causal Inference Under a Multilevel Quasi-Experimental Study
Royel Johnson University of Southern California	Examining the Varying Effects of Juvenile Arrest on College Enrollment for Racially/Ethnically Diverse Youth: The Role of School Level Factors
Adam Kho University of Southern California	A Teacher Similar to Me: The Role of Student-Teacher Race
Wenchao Ma University of Alabama	Examining the Gap in Adult’s Problem-Solving Competency in Technology-Enhanced Environment: A Cognitive Diagnostic Modeling Approach With Process Data
Hannah Miller and Jared Knowles Civilytics Consulting	Equity Analysis at a Large Scale: Using Small Area Estimation to Get the Most From the CRDC School Arrest Data
Soojin Park University of California, Riverside	Development of Causal Decomposition Analysis to Investigate Accumulating Racial Disparities in Student Achievement