July 2021

AERA has announced 12 recipients of its Dissertation and Research Grant Awards. The recipients are studying salient and relevant topics in education research that directly address or indirectly inform STEM, such as science course-taking trajectories, student achievement gaps, and access to higher education. The recipients are selected through and supported by the AERA-NSF Grants Program, which has been funded by the National Science Foundation since 1990.

These scholars are using federal data sets or federally funded data sets such as from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study, the High School Longitudinal Study,  the Add Health Study, the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study, the Common Core of Data, and the Civil Rights Data Collection. Also,  Statewide Longitudinal Data Systems (SLDS) such as the SLDS data from Tennessee, North Carolina, or Texas are used by awardees. These studies use rigorous quantitative methods and advanced statistical techniques to examine topics and issues in education research.

The grants provide advanced graduate students with $25,000 for one year as they write up their research; early career scholars receive up to $35,000 for a two-year study. In addition, scholars participate in professional development and training activities aimed at building their research capacity and encouraging the use large-scale data in education research.

Since 1990, the AERA-NSF Grants Program has supported over 600 graduate students and early career scholars as they launched their careers and developed their research agendas in STEM education research.

“The AERA-NSF Grants Program supports some of the most promising STEM education research that draws from large-scale data sets and state longitudinal administrative data,” said Barbara Schneider (Michigan State University), chair of the program’s governing board. “The program supports new and early career scholars who are expanding how we use large-scale data to understand and inform education practices and policies.”

Current and former AERA-NSF Grants Program grantees will present their research in poster sessions during the 2022 AERA Annual Meeting in San Diego. For more information about the Grants Program, visit the AERA website. The next proposal deadline for Dissertation and Research Grant Awards will be October 5. The tables below list the dissertation and research grant recipients who will begin their research this summer.

AERA Grants Dissertation Awardees
Recipient		Project Title
	Amberly Dziesinski Vanderbilt University	Tennessee HOPE Access: A Regression Discontinuity of Student Enrollment, Persistence, and Completion
	Heewon Jang    Stanford University	Racial Economic Segregation among U.S. Public Schools
	Elise Marifian University of Wisconsin, Madison	Selling College: The Effect of TV Advertising on the Demand for Higher Education
	Pamela Nicholas-Hoff University of Virginia	The Relationship Between School Racial Composition and Out-of-School Suspensions
	Connor Oswald Florida State University	The Best and Brightest, Investigating Florida's Teacher Scholarship Impact on Teacher Recruitment and Retention
	Zhiling Shea University of California, Irvine	Evidence on Interventions for Disadvantaged Children in Early Childhood Education
	Hyunwoo Yang University of Wisconsin, Madison	The Effects of Wisconsin's Universal 4K Program on Academic Achievement Gaps
	Patrick Graff      University of Notre Dame	Trust in Teachers: The Role of Teacher Experience and Relational Trust in Schools
	Charles Sanchez               University of Georgia	Here to Stay: Assessing the Relationship Between Pre-College Access Programs and College Enrollment and Persistence

 

AERA Grants Research Awardees
Recipient		Project Title
	Noli Brazil University of California, Davis	Urban Public School Closures and School District Segregation in the United States
	Chloe Gibbs University of Notre Dame	The War on Poverty and Higher Education Access: Educational Attainment and Intergenerational Effects of Upward Bound
	David Mickey-Pabello Harvard University/UCLA	No Merit in the Meritocracy: The Ostensible Conservatism of Affirmative Action Bans
	Hajime Mitani Rowan University	Performance-based Compensation Systems and Principal Job Performance
	Jackie Relyea     North Carolina State University	Co-Development of Reading Ability and Science Content Knowledge for Elementary-Grade English Learners: The Impact of Language Instruction Educational Program (LIEP)
	Michael Villarreal           University of Texas at San Antonio	The Incidence and Effects of School Mobility on Educational Achievement
	Xiaoyang Ye       Brown University	High School Mathematics and Science Coursetaking Trajectories: Understanding Coursetaking, Its Relationship to Outcomes, and the Potential for Information to Affect Change
	Se Woong Lee   University of Missouri	Painting the Landscape of Rural Racial Achievement Gaps: Locale, Race, and Achievement
	Benjamin Shear                University of Colorado Boulder	Gender Bias in Item Formats for Large-Scale Assessment: New Evidence and Considerations for State Accountability Testing

The AERA Grants Program is funded by the National Science Foundation under NSF award NSF-DRL #1749275.