Research Project Value at NSF
Today I sat in a meeting that gave an overview of the programs and funding opportunities available to education institutions from the National Science Foundation. The NSF representative was very informative and the meeting helped me to understand the direction the foundation is interested in.
A significant amount of time during this meeting was spent describing the increasing emphasis of NSF on evaluation as a critical component to any submitted proposal. A couple of comments were made about the difficulty of evaluating and measuring the impact of projects on educational systems, student learning and overall impact. Apparently, the foundation is increasingly being called to be accountable for their impact and “ROI” on their budget. I have never been involved in writing a grant, but I have had the opportunity to read a few that our PI’s have submitted over the past few years. Evaluation has always been a component, so it surprised me to learn that NSF has not consistently required that in the past.
What is valuable? PI’s are being asked to articulate their own goals for their own proposed projects…and then make provision to evaluate their own project against their own goals. In science, you shouldn’t pose an idea as theory if you can’t design an experiment to test it.
Our own faculty in the School of Education recently wrestled with articulating their own programs’ goals and how to measure student progress toward those goals. This is an ongoing theme in so many things the LSB is involved with right now. It is the underpinning on what I see as a shift from constructivist tools like the current Dialogue Project and towards tools like the Goal Aware tools. Data driven decision making principles are changing the way that so many programs think.
A significant amount of time during this meeting was spent describing the increasing emphasis of NSF on evaluation as a critical component to any submitted proposal. A couple of comments were made about the difficulty of evaluating and measuring the impact of projects on educational systems, student learning and overall impact. Apparently, the foundation is increasingly being called to be accountable for their impact and “ROI” on their budget. I have never been involved in writing a grant, but I have had the opportunity to read a few that our PI’s have submitted over the past few years. Evaluation has always been a component, so it surprised me to learn that NSF has not consistently required that in the past.
What is valuable? PI’s are being asked to articulate their own goals for their own proposed projects…and then make provision to evaluate their own project against their own goals. In science, you shouldn’t pose an idea as theory if you can’t design an experiment to test it.
Our own faculty in the School of Education recently wrestled with articulating their own programs’ goals and how to measure student progress toward those goals. This is an ongoing theme in so many things the LSB is involved with right now. It is the underpinning on what I see as a shift from constructivist tools like the current Dialogue Project and towards tools like the Goal Aware tools. Data driven decision making principles are changing the way that so many programs think.