Northwestern Receives $3.7 Million for Training Program
Dept. of Education Institute grant will ground research in evidence-based approaches

Fall 2005, Volume 27, Number 1

MPES students Jennifer Asmuth and Julie Colhoun discuss a presentation.

Two IPR faculty fellows will be directing a doctoral training program, established by a $3.7 million grant from the U.S. Department of Education’s Institute of Education Sciences (IES). The grant will be used to train Northwestern doctoral students to identify and measure best practices for K-12 education. Northwestern’s School of Education and Social Policy is taking the lead in administering the program, with assistance from the Judd A. and Marjorie Weinberg School of Arts and Sciences.

Schools today are faced with increasing pressures to improve student achievement as exemplified by the federal No Child Left Behind mandate. They are also faced with a plethora of solutions coming at them from all sides—from academia to the corporate world and advocacy groups. Unfortunately, a lack of evidence-based research means that it is often impossible for educators to determine the empirical effectiveness of such solutions.

The training program will help to address this pressing problem by creating a cadre of researchers devoted to testing and identifying empirically sound educational practices and the degree to which they will benefit students and schools.

The researchers’ output will, in turn, benefit educators who “too often fly by the seat of their pants and adopt new curricula or teaching practices that seem good but are largely unproven,” noted James Spillane, IPR faculty fellow, professor of human development, social policy, and learning sciences, and the program’s director until 2008-09.

The IES training grant has established the Multidisciplinary Program in Education Sciences or MPES and created 22 three-year fellowships and partial funding for a new tenure-track faculty position. Northwestern is supporting the training program with an additional $1.2 million in funds.

Northwestern was one of five universities to receive the highly competitive, five-year grant. The other four universities are Carnegie Mellon, Florida State, Virginia, and Vanderbilt.

The program’s 10 core faculty members are drawn from fields across the university: human development and social policy, learning sciences, psychology, sociology, economics, and statistics. Ph.D. students must be enrolled in one of these disciplines to be eligible.

IPR Faculty Fellow Greg J. Duncan, Edwina S. Tarry Professor of Education and Social Policy, will become the program director in 2009-10. Lindsay Chase-Lansdale, professor of human development and social policy and an IPR faculty fellow, is serving as deputy director of the program. Several IPR faculty fellows are also on the program’s steering committee. They include: Thomas D. Cook, Joan and Sarepta Harrison Chair in Ethics and Justice; James Rosenbaum, professor of human development, social policy, and sociology; Bruce D. Spencer, professor of statistics; and Christopher Taber, Household International Inc. Research Professor of Economics.