From the IES Director: New Directions for Next Year’s Funding Opportunities

Institute of Education Sciences (IES) Director Mark Schneider has published a blog post on new directions for next year’s funding opportunities. IES just released FY 2021 RFAs for its largest grant programs. A guiding principle has been to simplify RFAs to allow researchers more freedom to pursue new ideas and approaches leading to improved education outcomes within budget constraints. As RFAs are simplified, IES continues to emphasize the need for cost analysis and more dissemination activities. Given these heightened demands, most RFAs have higher funding limits than in the past.

To read the full blog, see New Directions for Next Year’s Funding Opportunities.

• Simplifying RFAs to allow pursuit of new ideas and approaches
• Emphasizing the need for cost analysis
• Asking for more dissemination activities
• Encouraging the use of common measures
• Recognizing that replication is core to any science
• Using Standards for Excellence in Education Research (SEER) principles: https://ies.ed.gov/seer/

The SEER Principles encourage researchers to

• Pre-register studies
• Make findings, methods, and data open
• Identify interventions’ core components
• Document treatment implementation and contrast
• Analyze interventions’ costs
• Focus on meaningful outcomes
• Facilitate generalization of study findings
• Support scaling of promising results