NEA Leadership grants

NEA's Learning & Leadership grants support public school teachers, public education support professionals, and/or faculty and staff in public institutions of higher education for one of the following two purposes:

• Grants to individuals fund participation in high-quality professional development experiences, such as summer institutes or action research; or
• Grants to groups fund collegial study, including study groups, action research, lesson study, or mentoring experiences for faculty or staff new to an assignment.

All professional development must improve practice, curriculum, and student achievement. "One-shot" professional growth experiences, such as attending a national conference or engaging a professional speaker, are discouraged. Decisions regarding the content of the professional growth activities must be based upon an assessment of student work undertaken with colleagues, and must be integrated into the institutional planning process. Grant funds may be used for fees, travel expenses, books, or other materials that enable applicants to learn subject matter, instructional approaches, and skills. Recipients are required to exercise professional leadership by sharing their new learning with their colleagues.

Amount: $2,000 for individuals; $5,000 for groups

Date due: February 1, 2012

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NEA Foundation grants

Applications for student-achievement grants from the NEA Foundation for the Improvement of Education. Grants of $5,000 each will support individuals whose work engages students in critical thinking and problem solving that increase their knowledge of curricular subject matter. Proposals that focus on enrolling low-income or minority students in advanced coursework are especially encouraged. Eligible applicants include faculty from colleges and universities.

Amount: $5,000

Date due: February 1, 2011

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Discovery Research K-12 Program

The Discovery Research K-12 program (DRK-12) seeks to significantly enhance the learning and teaching of Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) by preK-12 students, teachers, administrators and parents. All DRK-12 projects should be framed around a research question or hypothesis that addresses an important need or topic in preK-12 STEM education. The emphasis in DRK-12 is on research projects that study the development, testing, deployment, effectiveness, and/or scale-up of innovative resources, models and tools. DRK-12 invites proposals that address immediate challenges that are facing preK-12 STEM education as well as those that anticipate a radically different structure and function of pre-K 12 teaching and learning.

DRK-12 especially encourages proposals that challenge existing assumptions about learning and teaching within or across STEM fields, envision the future needs of learners, and consider new and innovative ways to support student and teacher learning. DRK-12 is particularly interested in projects that hold promise for identifying and developing the next generation of STEM innovators (NSB, 2010). There are four strands described in detail in the solicitation: 1) Assessment; 2) Learning; 3) Teaching; 4) Scale-up.DRK-12 projects are based on theories of learning, prior research and development. Projects reflect the needs of an increasingly diverse population as well as national, state, or discipline priorities. Outcomes include usable and scalable resources, models, tools, and contributions to the knowledge about STEM teaching and learning. In addition, teachers and students who participate in DRK-12 studies are expected to enhance their understanding and use of STEM content, practices and skills.The DRK-12 program is primarily concerned with the goals and effectiveness of formal education, but recognizes that learning is not limited to formal school environments and times. The program encourages projects to draw from knowledge and practice of learning in out-of-school and informal settings.Most young people and STEM professionals today use powerful technologies in the activities of their everyday lives. New knowledge, new ways of thinking, and new ways of finding and processing information drive our society and economy. Many of the resources, models and tools researched and developed by DRK-12 will provide innovative ways to use current and emerging technologies to transform STEM education.DRK-12 recognizes that outstanding teaching is a critical and integral component of this improvement process. While

Strand 3 has a specific focus on resources, models and tools for teacher education and the impact of those models on student learning, projects submitted to the other strands may also include teacher support materials or professional development components in support of student learning. Projects submitted to the Learning strand might also include the development of assessments related to the specific goals of the project. Some DRK-12 projects focus on a specific STEM discipline or concept, while others have cross-disciplinary, cross-grade level content, but all projects must demonstrate that the content is important from both a disciplinary and learning perspective. Full Research and Development projects are expected to lead to successful dissemination and adoption of findings or products in the preK-12 enterprise at a scale beyond that directly supported by the grant.

Amount: $1 million

Date due: January 10, 2012

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Cyberlearning: Transforming Education

Through the Cyberlearning: Transforming Education program, NSF seeks to integrate advances in technology with advances in what is known about how people learn to better understand how people learn with technology and how technology can be used productively to help people learn, through individual use and/or through collaborations mediated by technology;better use technology for collecting, analyzing, sharing, and managing data to shed light on learning, promoting learning, and designing learning environments; anddesign new technologies for these purposes, and advance understanding of how to use those technologies and integrate them into learning environments so that their potential is fulfilled.Of particular interest are technological advances that allow more personalized learning experiences, draw in and promote learning among those in populations not served well by current educational practices, allow access to learning resources anytime and anywhere, and provide new ways of assessing capabilities. It is expected that Cyberlearning research will shed light on how technology can enable new forms of educational practice and that broad implementation of its findings will result in a more actively-engaged and productive citizenry and workforce.Cyberlearning awards will be made in three research categories, each focusing on a different stage of research and development: Exploratory (EXP), Design and Implementation (DIP), and Integration and Deployment (INDP). The Cyberlearning program will also support small Capacity-Building Projects (CAP) and a Cyberlearning Resource Center (CRC).

Amount: $2.5 million

Date due: February 12, 2012

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Partnerships for International Research (PIRE)

Partnerships for International Research and Education (PIRE) is an NSF-wide program that supports international activities across all NSF supported disciplines. The primary goal of PIRE is to support high quality projects in which advances in research and education could not occur without international collaboration. PIRE seeks to catalyze a higher level of international engagement in the U.S. science and engineering community. International partnerships are essential to addressing critical science and engineering problems. In the global context, U.S. researchers and educators must be able to operate effectively in teams with partners from different nations and cultural backgrounds. PIRE promotes excellence in science and engineering through international collaboration and facilitates development of a diverse, globally-engaged, U.S. science and engineering workforce. This PIRE competition will focus exclusively on the NSF-wide investment area of Science, Engineering, and Education for Sustainability (SEES). The SEES effort focuses on interdisciplinary topics that will advance sustainability science, engineering and education as an integrative approach to the challenges of adapting to environmental, social and cultural changes associated with growth and development of human populations, and attaining a sustainable energy future.

Amount: $4 million across 5 years

Date due: Preliminary proposals due October 19, 2011

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Personnel Development To Improve Services and Results for Children With Disabilities: Personnel Preparation in Special Education, Early Intervention,

The purposes of this program are to (1) help address State-identified needs for highly qualified personnel--in special education, related services, early intervention, and regular education--to work with children, including infants and toddlers, with disabilities; and (2) ensure that those personnel have the necessary skills and knowledge, derived from practices that have been determined through scientifically-based research and experience, to be successful in serving those children.

Amount: $250,000/year

Due Date: May 31, 2011

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Digging into Data (Information Technology/Sciences)

The creation of vast quantities of Internet-accessible digital data and the development of techniques for large-scale data analysis have led to remarkable new discoveries in genetics, astronomy, and other fields, and—importantly—connections between different academic disciplines. The Digging into Data Challenge seeks to discover how these new research techniques might also be applied to questions in the humanities and social sciences. New techniques of large-scale data analysis allow researchers to discover relationships, detect discrepancies, and perform computations on so-called “big data” sets that are so large that they can be processed only by using computing resources and computational methods that were developed and made economically affordable within the past few years. This “data deluge” has arisen not just from the capture and storage of data on everyday transactions such as Internet searches, consumer purchases, cell phone records, “smart” metering systems and sensors, but also from the digitization of all types of media, with books, newspapers, journals, films, artworks, and sound recordings being digitized on a massive scale. It is possible to apply data linkage and analysis techniques to large and diverse data collections, including survey data, economic data, digitized newspapers, books, music, and other scholarly and scientific resources. How might these techniques help researchers use these materials to ask new questions about and gain new insights into our world? To encourage innovative approaches to this question, eight international research organizations are organizing a joint grant competition to focus the attention of the social sciences, humanities, library, archival, and information sciences communities on large-scale data analysis and its potential applications. The four goals of the initiative are * to promote the development and deployment of innovative research techniques in large-scale data analysis that focus on applications for the humanities and social sciences; * to foster interdisciplinary collaboration among researchers in the humanities, social sciences, computer sciences, library, archive, information sciences, and other fields, around questions of text and data analysis; * to promote international collaboration among both researchers and funders; and * to ensure efficient access to and sharing of the materials for research by working with data repositories that hold large digital collections.

Amount: $175,000

Date due: June 16, 2011

For more information, click here.