IES Blog

Institute of Education Sciences

The 2023 IES PI Meeting: Building on 20 Years of IES Research to Accelerate the Education Sciences

On May 16-18, 2023, NCER and NCSER hosted our second virtual Principal Investigators (PI) Meeting. Our theme this year was Building on 20 Years of IES Research to Accelerate the Education Sciences. Because it was the IES 20th anniversary this past year, we used this meeting as an opportunity to reflect on and celebrate the success of IES and the education research community. Another goal was to explore how IES can further advance the education sciences and improve education outcomes for all learners.

Roddy Theobald (American Institutes for Research) and Eunsoo Cho (Michigan State University) graciously agreed to be our co-chairs this year. They provided guidance on the meeting theme and session strands and also facilitated our plenary sessions on Improving Data on Teachers and Staffing Challenges to Inform the Next 20 Years of Teacher Workforce Policy and Research and the Disproportionate Impact of COVID-19 on Student Learning and Contributions of Education Sciences to Pandemic Recovery Efforts. We want to thank them for their incredible efforts in making this year’s meeting a big success!

Here are a few highlights:

The meeting kicked off with opening remarks from IES Director, Mark Schneider, and a welcome from the Secretary of Education, Miguel Cardona. Director Schneider spoke about the importance of timeliness of research and translation of evidence to practice. IES is thinking about how best to support innovative approaches to education research that are transformative, embrace failure, are quick turnaround, and have an applied focus. He also discussed the need for data to move the field forward, specifically big data researchers can use to address important policy questions and improve interventions and education outcomes. Secretary Cardona acknowledged the robust and useful evidence base that IES-funded researchers have generated over the last 20 years and emphasized the need for continued research to address historic inequities and accelerate pandemic recovery for students.

This year’s meeting fostered connections and facilitated deep conversations around meaningful and relevant topic areas. Across the three day PI Meeting, we had over 1,000 attendees engaged in virtual room discussions around four main topic areas (see the agenda for a complete list of this year’s sessions):

  • Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Accessibility (DEIA)—Sessions addressed DEIA in education research
  • Recovering and Learning from the COVID-19 Pandemic—Sessions discussed accelerating pandemic recovery for students and educators, lessons learned from the pandemic, and opportunities to implement overdue changes to improve education
  • Innovative Approaches to Education Research—Sessions focused on innovative, forward-looking research ideas, approaches, and methods to improve education research in both the short- and long-term
  • Making Connections Across Disciplines and Communities—Sessions highlighted connections between research and practice communities and between researchers and projects across different disciplines and methodologies

We also had several sessions focused on providing information and opportunities to engage with IES leadership, including NCER Commissioner’s Welcome; NCSER Acting Commissioner’s Welcome; Open Science and IES, NCEE at 20: Past Successes and Future Directions; and The IES Scientific Review Process: Overview, Common Myths, and Feedback.

Many  sessions also had a strong focus on increasing the practical impacts of education research by getting research into the hands of practitioners and policymakers. For example, the session on Beyond Academia: Navigating the Broader Research-Practice Pipeline highlighted the unique challenges of navigating the pipeline of information that flows between researchers and practitioners and identified strategies that researchers could implement in designing, producing, and publishing research-based products that are relevant to a broad audience. The LEARNing to Scale: A Networked Initiative to Prepare Evidence-Based Practices & Products for Scaling and The Road to Scale Up: From Idea to Intervention sessions centered around challenges and strategies for scaling education innovations from basic research ideas to applied and effective interventions. Finally, the Transforming Knowledge into Action: An Interactive Discussion focused on identifying and capturing ways to strengthen dissemination plans and increase the uptake of evidence-based resources and practices.  

We ended the three-day meeting with trivia and a celebration. Who was the first Commissioner of NCSER? Which program officer started the same day the office closed because of the pandemic? Which program officer has dreams of opening a bakery? If you want to know the answers to these questions and more, we encourage you to look at the Concluding Remarks.  

Finally, although we weren’t in person this year, we learned from last year’s meeting that a real benefit of having a virtual PI meeting is our ability to record all the sessions and share them with the public. A part of IES’s mission is to widely disseminate IES-supported research. We encourage you to watch the recorded sessions and would be grateful if you shared it with your networks.

We want to thank the attendees who made this meeting so meaningful and engaging. This meeting would not have been a success without your contributions. We hope to see our grantees at the next PI Meeting, this time in-person!

If you have any comments, questions, or suggestions for how we can further advance the education sciences and improve education outcomes for all learners, please do not hesitate to contact NCER Commissioner Liz Albro (Elizabeth.Albro@ed.gov) or NCSER Acting Commissioner Jackie Buckley (Jacquelyn.Buckley@ed.gov). We look forward to hearing from you.

 

Have a Cost Analysis to Plan or Execute? We Have a Module for That

This blog is part of a guest series by the Cost Analysis in Practice (CAP) project team.

Analyzing an intervention’s costs is one of IES’s nine SEER principles. Cost analysis is not just about the dollar value of an intervention; it provides key information to education decision-makers about the personnel, materials, facilities, and other inputs needed to implement an intervention or policy with fidelity. But planning and executing any kind of economic evaluation, such as a cost analysis or cost-effectiveness analysis, involves many steps.

The IES-funded Cost Analysis in Practice Project (CAP Project) has developed a series of five free, online modules on cost analysis. Each module includes a sequence of short videos (3‑17 minutes each) and resources to facilitate each of the 4 main stages of a cost analysis: study design, data collection, data analysis, and reporting (register here for the CAP Project online modules).

The modules are timely for anyone submitting a grant application to the IES FY 2024 grant programs that require a cost analysis. In addition, cost studies are included in the Education Innovation and Research (EIR) Mid-phase or Expansion grants. For your grant application, you’ll likely only need parts of Modules 1 and 2, Introduction to Cost Analysis and Designing a Cost Analysis. You can save the rest for when you receive a grant.

You should review the IES Request for Applications (RFA) to determine what kind of economic evaluation, if any, is required for your IES application. You can also review the CAP Project’s RFA requirements chart, which summarizes our take on what is required and what is recommended for each IES RFA. If your grant application does not require a cost analysis but you want to include one, we created a flowchart to help you decide which type of evaluation might make sense for your situation: see Module 1 Video 2b. We also provide a brief example of each kind of economic evaluation in Module 1 Video 3. 

If cost analysis is new to you, Module 1 Video 1 explains what “costs” really are. Module 1 Video 2a introduces the ingredients method and a demonstration of why it’s important to differentiate between economic costs and expenditures. Module 1 Video 4 walks you through the four stages of a cost analysis and points out when to use specific CAP Project resources such as our Checklist for Cost Analysis Plans, Timeline of Activities for Cost Analysis, and Cost Analysis Templates (the “CAPCATs”). If you prefer reading to watching videos, our Cost Analysis Standards & Guidelines cover this ground in more depth.

When you’re ready to plan your cost or cost-effectiveness analysis, head to Module 2. The introductory video (Module 2 Video 1) discusses a few critical decisions you need to make early on that will affect how much of your study budget should be dedicated to the economic evaluation—no one likes surprises there. Module 2 Videos 2 and 3 walk you through the design of an economic evaluation, illustrating each design feature using Reading Recovery as an example. Module 2 Video 4 presents a few scenarios to help you think about which costs you will estimate and how the costs of the intervention you plan to study compare to the costs of business as usual. Module 2 Video 5 reviews a timeline and key activities for each stage of your economic evaluation. The content in Modules 1 and 2 should help you develop a robust plan for an economic evaluation so that you’ll be all set to begin the study as soon as you are funded.

Modules 3-5 cover data collection, analysis, and reporting. You may want to skim these now, or at least watch the brief introductory videos for an overview of what’s in store for you and your cost analyst. These modules can help you execute your cost study.


Fiona Hollands is the Founder & Managing Director of EdResearcher. She studies the effectiveness and costs of educational programs with the goal of helping education practitioners and policymakers optimize the use of resources in education to promote better student outcomes.

Jaunelle Pratt-Williams is a Senior Research Scientist at NORC at the University of Chicago. She leads economic evaluations and mixed-methods policy research studies to improve the educational opportunities for historically underserved students.

This blog was produced by Allen Ruby (Allen.Ruby@ed.gov), Associate Commissioner, NCER.

Letter from the Acting NCSER Commissioner: Providing Clarity on NCSER Fiscal Year 2023 Funding and Fiscal Year 2024 Competitions

The IES director recently posted a blog indicating that IES had to return approximately $44 million in unobligated funds of the $100 million total American Rescue Plan (ARP) funding IES received to help the nation's students recover from the learning losses of the pandemic. NCSER was hard hit by the rescission of these funds.

As transparent as we try to be, admittedly, the federal budgeting process is not always clear. Many of you have reached out with concerns about the potential impact of these ARP rescissions on your current grants and future funding opportunities. Please allow me to explain the current context of fiscal year 2023 funding and forecast for fiscal year 2024.

NCSER's Grant Funding: Where the Money Comes From and How It Is Spent

NCSER funds come from the Research in Special Education (RiSE) appropriation, which is one small part of the larger IES appropriations account. RiSE supports all of NCSER’s typical grant competitions. We also contribute money from this account to our share of other IES activities such as the grant peer review process and the PI meeting.

As those of you who have been funded by NSCER know, we provide grant funding on an annual basis. Even though we fund projects annually, once we make an award, we are committed to providing annual costs for a continuing project through the duration of the designated study period. Consequently, the amount of money available to support new research and training awards each year is contingent, in part, upon the number of current awards and their outyear costs. Any time NCSER funds a high number of new awards (and thereby commits to funding every award through the duration of the designated study period), there will be less money available for new awards the following year, unless the RiSE program appropriation receives an increase from Congress.

Deciding what new grant competitions in NCSER might look like in any given year requires that we balance many factors, including: (1) the amount of funding Congress is likely to appropriate to RiSE (note that we typically have to make decisions before we know for sure how much money we will have), (2) projected continuation costs for existing awards and commitments, (3) estimates of total funding available for new awards based on 1 and 2 above, and (4) a best guess prediction of the percent of applicants that will be successful, based on trends over time, in any single NCSER sponsored competition. If you have been around NCSER long enough, you know our funding is typically very tight, sometimes so tight we can’t offer any competitions (FY 2014) or need to significantly limit available competitions (FY 2017).

NCSER’s ARP-funded Research Projects

In FY 2022, once again, we found ourselves with insufficient funds to hold our typical special education research grant competitions. At the same time, IES received $100 million in ARP funding. With NCSER’s share of those funds, we chose, in part, to hold a new Research to Accelerate Pandemic Recovery in Special Education grants program to fund projects that addressed the urgent challenges faced by districts and schools in supporting learners with or at risk for disabilities, their teachers, and their families in the aftermath of the pandemic. The competition was funded solely using ARP funds. To be clear, RiSE funds were never intended to be a source of funding for these projects. 

By now you may be predicting where this blog is going…

NCSER was thrilled to be able to fund 9 research grants through this ARP-funded competition, all of which have the potential to improve outcomes significantly and rapidly for students with or at risk for disabilities. A little less than 2 months ago, NCSER was in the process of documenting annual progress and approving continuation funding for these grantees when the ARP funds were unexpectedly rescinded (returned to the U.S. Treasury as part of the debt ceiling deal). These projects were in various stages of progress, but each was just finishing the first year of the grant and it is fair to say that, overall, a significant amount of work (and grant costs) remained at the time of this rescission.

As I mentioned, NCSER has operated from the perspective that when we make a commitment to funding your grant, we prioritize your continuation costs first before funding new awards or initiatives. In other words, if we are ever in a budget crunch, we will meet our existing commitments first before using money on new activities. Although the ARP funding source was eliminated, our commitment to those FY 2022 ARP-funded grants remained. We chose to use money from our RiSE account to pay for current and future continuation costs for these grants. I hope everyone can understand that this difficult decision honors our standard practice of prioritizing existing commitments.

NCSER’s FY 2023 Research Competition

After accounting for the cost of the continuations that would have otherwise been supported using ARP funds, NCSER’s ability to fund new awards in the FY 2023 grant competition was limited. Further exasperating our new budget shortfall was the much higher than expected (based on past application and funding trends) number of FY 2023 applications that were rated outstanding or excellent. This is a great testament to the field and the work that you all do! Unfortunately, this success came at the same time as this unexpected, very large budget rescission. Something had to give and sadly, what gave was our ability to fund many worthy new grants. It was not a decision made lightly or without thought for those grants left unfunded. I know that many of you are disappointed in this outcome.

It takes a tremendous amount of effort to produce a grant application and we recognize your continued efforts to work with NCSER staff throughout the pre-award process. It is heartbreaking to find out a grant you submitted won’t be funded, despite having such a strong score. NCSER staff were heartbroken with you.

Outlook for FY 2024

What does this all mean for NCSER moving forward? Despite the setback this year, based on available information we have now, NCSER plans to offer research competitions in FY 2024. We are committed to offering new funding opportunities whenever possible to continue the tremendous strides we have made in improving the depth, breadth, and quality of special education research in this country.

NCSER and NCER will be notifying the field very soon regarding FY 2024 competitions, so stay tuned. If you have not done so already, please sign up for our Newsflash to stay current on IES happenings, including the release of new funding opportunities.

Although the challenges we experienced this year certainly were disappointing, I want to end on what I see as the silver lining that emerged from of all of this. Namely, since NCSER’s first research competitions in 2006, the capacity in the field to conduct high-quality research and carry out excellent research training has grown tremendously. We should not forget how far we have come, and how bright NCSER’s future is. Our funding has not (yet!) kept pace with that growth, but that is a subject for another blog…

Please reach out to me at Jacquelyn.Buckley@ed.gov with questions or comments. I'm always happy to hear from you!

New Standards to Advance Equity in Education Research

One year ago, IES introduced a new equity standard and associated recommendations to its Standards for Excellence in Education Research (SEER). The intent of this standard, as well as the other eight SEER standards, is to complement IES’s focus on rigorous evidence building with guidance and supports for practices that have the potential to make research transformational. The addition of equity to SEER is part of IES’s ongoing mission to improve academic achievement and access to educational opportunities for all learners (see IES Diversity Statement). IES is mindful, however, that to authentically and rigorously integrate equity into research, education researchers may need additional resources and tools. To that end, IES hosted a Technical Working Group (TWG) meeting of experts to gather input for IES’s consideration regarding the existing tools and resources that the education community could use as they implement the new SEER equity standard in their research, along with identifying any notable gaps where tools and resources are needed. A summary of the TWG panel discussion and recommendations is now available.

The TWG panel recommended several relevant resources and provided concrete suggestions for ways IES can support education researchers’ learning and growth, including training centers, coaching sessions, webinars, checklists, and new resource development, acknowledging that different researchers may need different kinds of supports. The meeting summary includes both a mix of recommendations for tools and resources, along with important considerations for researchers, including recommendations for best practices, as they try to embed equity in their research. 

The new SEER equity standard and accompanying recommendations have been integrated throughout the current FY 2024 Request for Applications. By underscoring the importance of equity, the research IES supports will both be rigorous and relevant to address the needs of all learners.   


This blog was written by NCER program officer Christina Chhin. If you have questions or feedback regarding the equity TWG, please contact Christina Chhin (Christina.Chhin@ed.gov) or Katina Stapleton (Katina.Stapleton@ed.gov), co-chair of the IES Diversity Council. If you have any questions or feedback regarding the equity standard or associated recommendations, please email NCEE.Feedback@ed.gov.

Getting to Know ED: My Journey as a STEM Next Fellow at IES

This guest blog was contributed by Dr. Holly Miller, who currently serves as a STEM Next Opportunity Fund Fellow at the Institute of Education Science’s National Center for Education Evaluation.

Since August 2022, I’ve been serving as the STEM Next Opportunity Afterschool and Summer Learning Fellow at the U.S. Department of Education (ED). More specifically, I work within the Department’s Institute of Education Sciences (IES).

Upon arriving at IES, I was charged with a specific challenge: amplify how evidence-based practice in out-of-school time (OST) can support student learning and development. This mission was made all the more relevant by the need for states and districts to respond to the consequences of the COVID pandemic which, at the time, remained an official national emergency.

Perhaps naively, I hoped to walk in on Day One and find “The Official Compendium of Evidence-based Practices in Global Pandemics and Related Crises” that I could pull off the shelf and hand to educators. Unfortunately, I quickly discovered no such tome existed. And I began to realize that one of the biggest challenges I’d face in my new role was getting to know ED itself! To an outsider, the Department can seem like a huge machine. Getting to know it, though, can pay incredible dividends. As I came to learn, there are tons of great resources—if only you know where to look.

One of OST educators’ first stops in getting to know ED should be IES. For the uninitiated, IES is the Department’s statistics, research, and evaluation arm. The mission of IES is to provide scientific evidence on which to ground education practice and policy and to share this information in formats that are useful and accessible to educators, parents, policymakers, researchers, and the public. It is independent and non-partisan.

Across its four centers—the National Centers for Education Statistics, Education Evaluation, Education Research, and Special Education Research—IES conducts six broad types of work (http://ies.ed.gov):

1. Providing data to describe the “condition of education,” including students’ academic proficiency.

2. Conducting surveys and sponsoring research projects to understand where education needs improvement and how these improvements might be made.

3. Funding development and rigorous testing of new approaches for improving education outcomes for all students.

4. Conducting large-scale evaluations of federal education programs and policies.

5. Providing resources to increase the use of data and research in education decision-making, including independent reviews of research on “what works” in education through the What Works Clearinghouse.

6. Supporting the advancement of statistics and research through specialized training and development of methods and measures.

I could see that this work had the potential to benefit a variety of stakeholders—teachers, administrators, students, researchers, and policymakers. Still, I had so many unanswered questions. As a middle school teacher, I frequently told students, “The only dumb question is the one you don’t ask.” Therefore, as I surveyed the education research landscape at IES, I asked lots and lots of questions. My presence at IES was akin to a toddler at the zoo for the first time: “What are those? Why is that so big? Why don’t we have more of these? When do we eat?” Months of asking and I find my queries have been distilled into two essential questions:

  1. What has been the impact of the COVID pandemic on students and educators; and

 

  1. How can education research, like that conducted or sponsored by IES, help us understand—and address—those impacts?

What has been the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic?

The pandemic disrupted nearly every aspect of daily life in the United States, including the education system. One of the most alarming impacts of the pandemic on education has been the widening of pre-existing gaps in student achievement and the resources that students need to be successful.

We all know the statistics … students have lost tons of learning. The "Report on the Condition of Education" is a congressionally mandated annual report from the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES). Using the most recent data available from NCES and other sources, the report contains key indicators on the condition of education in the United States at all levels, from prekindergarten through postsecondary, as well as labor force outcomes and international comparisons. For example, the report on the condition of education 2023 recently released shares that on both the 4th- and 8th-grade NAEP mathematics assessments, higher percentages of students performed below NAEP Basic in 2022 than in 2019 (Irwin et al., 2023).  This has been particularly bad among students who have historically been underserved. The average NAEP mathematics scores in 2022 were generally lower for English Learners (EL) students than for non-EL students; lower for those identified as students with disabilities than for their peers without disabilities; and higher for students in low-poverty schools than for students in high-poverty schools. These patterns were similar to those observed for reading (Irwin et al., 2023).

This is surely due, at least in part, to differences in the resources students have access to. Even before the pandemic, huge gaps in resources existed. The pandemic only made matters worse. According to a report by the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR) (2021), low-income students and students of color have been disproportionately negatively impacted by school shutdowns and remote learning practices. These students often lack access to reliable technology and internet resources, making it difficult for them to participate fully in online classes and complete assignments. Additionally, many students rely on meals provided by schools, so the closure of physical school buildings has led to food insecurity for some.

Also of note: the dramatic effect on student wellbeing. During the pandemic, mental health concerns such as fear, anxiety, and depression were common among the general public, especially children and older adults (Brooks et al., 2020; Pfefferbaum & North, 2020).  Research on the pandemic’s impact on mental health among students finds that “they showed increased fear, stress, and decreased happiness, and these were associated with their learning quality change.” (Hu et al., 2022).

Furthermore, the impact of COVID on educators is increasingly well-known. Educators had to make changes in short order, often with limited resources. This had consequences. Educators faced increased stress levels due to the shift to remote instruction, and many reported struggling to maintain a work-life balance while working from home. Findings indicate teachers reported greater mental health concerns than those in many other professions, and that remote teachers reported significantly higher levels of distress than those teaching in person (Kush et al., 2021). For some, it was too much, and they made the decision to leave the profession. Forty percent of public schools hiring for open teaching positions in special education in 2020–21 reported having difficulties filling the opening, compared with 17 percent in 2011–12 (Irwin et al., 2023) Not only were teachers leaving the workforce, but potential teachers were second-guessing their career choice. The number of persons enrolled in traditional teacher preparation programs decreased by 30 percent between 2012–13 and 2019–20, and the number of persons completing such programs decreased by 28 percent between 2012–13 and 2019–20 (Irwin et al., 2023).  

All of us are looking for solutions to all these problems. Given that I entered IES during the pandemic, I wanted to know how I could leverage its resources to help.

How can education research help?

First, I had to understand how IES, as a science agency, was structured to do the work of education research. My college textbook on education research (Newby, 2010) asserted that it should have three objectives: to explore issues and find answers to questions, to collect and disseminate information that shapes policy and decision-making, and to improve practice for practitioners.

It’s easy to see how the six broad areas of work at IES I listed above fit within those three objectives. For example, in normal (that is, pre-COVID) times, it’s the job of the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) to collect and disseminate education-related statistics and information about student achievement to inform the work of researchers, policymakers, and other education decision-makers. IES’ two research Centers, the National Centers for Education Research (NCER) and Special Education Research (NCSER) support researchers’ exploration of a wide range of education topics and their use of high-quality methods to answer important questions of policy and practice. Finally, the National Center for Education Evaluation and Regional Assistance (NCEE) conducts its own rigorous evaluations of federal policies and programs; supports states and districts in the use of data, evidence, and applied research to improve local practice; and disseminates information about “what works” through its What Works Clearinghouse (WWC). In the wake of the pandemic, IES had to quickly focus its activities and resources to meet new demands across the education system. Here are just a few of the new questions that IES had to address amid the pandemic.

  • What’s happening in schools, and who is learning in-person versus virtually or in hybrid settings? In late 2021, NCES leveraged work being done as part of the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) to meet an immediate need to better understand schools’ policies about learning mode, masking, and social distancing. In the weeks that followed, the School Pulse Panel was created (https://ies.ed.gov/schoolsurvey/spp/). Initially, the School Pulse focused on collecting monthly information on the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic from a national sample of elementary, middle, high, and combined-grade public schools. Over time, its focus has broadened. While some survey questions are asked repeatedly to observe trends over time, others are unique each month. IES is now able to provide regular and near-real-time snapshots into “what’s happening” in the nation’s schools on a wide range of topics that matter to educators, policymakers, and families.

 

 

  • How can educators and caregivers support student learning in online, hybrid, and at-home settings? With schools closed and remote learning becoming the norm, educators and caregivers had to adapt their teaching methods and find new ways to engage students. As part of a mandate to provide assistance about “what works” in education, NCEE supported a series of efforts to bring together information for teachers navigating online and hybrid teaching environments and for caregivers who were providing instruction at home. NCEE commissioned work leading to the development of the “Best Practice in K-12 Online Teaching” minicourse (here), freely available from North Carolina State University, to support teachers new to online education in their transition to the medium. (The literature review on which the mini-course is based can be found here). NCEE’s Regional Educational Laboratories developed nearly 200 pandemic-related resources. Notable examples include “Supporting Your Child’s Reading at Home” (https://ies.ed.gov/ncee/rel/Products/Region/southeast/Resource/100679), which focuses on the development of early literacy skills, and “Teaching Math to Young Children for Families and Caregivers” (https://ies.ed.gov/ncee/rel/Products/Region/central/Resource/100652).

   

Since its inception in 2002, IES and its Centers have supported decision-makers—be they federal, state, or local—and educators in making use of high-quality evidence in their practice. The pandemic showed just important IES, its resources, and its infrastructure, can be.

In the pandemic’s wake, though, it seems to me that building even more evidence about “what works” is vital. The American Rescue Plan (ARP) provided historic levels of resources to expand educational opportunities and to ensure that education is better able to address the wide-ranging needs of students and their families – especially those who were disproportionately impacted by the pandemic. Many ARP investments, including those related to OST, have the requirement that programs be rooted in evidence-based practices. Because there are still things to learn about what makes strong programs, we can strengthen the field by building evidence that can address key problems of practice.

Conclusion

When I came to ED and IES, searching for information on how to use evidence-based practices to support COVID recovery within the context of OST, I was lost. As I’ve come to better understand the organization, I’ve learned that vast resources are available. Half of the battle was just figuring out “what lives where” within the Department! I hope this blog has given OST practitioners a bit of a roadmap to make their own process of discovery easier.

In Part Two of this series, I will explore how OST learning fits into ED, education research, and the post-pandemic education system. The latter has been profoundly affected, creating an opportunity for innovation and transformation in the delivery of education. The value of research cannot be underestimated in this context. As a result, my next blog will pose two questions. First, I’ll ask what the role of OST in learning recovery can be in the years ahead.  Then I’ll consider what evidence needs to be built to make the most of what OST can offer. I hope you’ll read it!

I’d love to hear your thoughts on this blog. Send them my way at holly.miller@ed.gov.

 

Citations

Brooks S.K., Webster R.K., Smith L.E., Woodland L., Wessely S., Greenberg N., Rubin G.J. (2020). The psychological impact of quarantine and how to reduce it: rapid review of the evidence. Lancet North Am. Ed. 395(10227):912–920.

Education in a Pandemic: The Disparate Impacts of COVID-19 on America's Students 2021 U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR).

Hu K, Godfrey K, Ren Q, Wang S, Yang X, Li Q. (2022). The impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on college students in USA: Two years later. Psychiatry Res. Sep; 315:114685.

Huck, C., & Zhang, J. (2021). Effects of the COVID-19 Pandemic on K-12 Education: A Systematic Literature Review. New Waves-Educational Research and Development Journal, 24(1), 53-84.

Irwin, V., Wang, K., Tezil, T., Zhang, J., Filbey, A., Jung, J., ... & Parker, S. (2023). Report on the Condition of Education 2023. NCES 2023-144. National Center for Education Statistics.

Kush, J. M., Badillo-Goicoechea, E., Musci, R. J., & Stuart, E. A. (2021). Teacher mental health during the COVID-19 pandemic: informing policies to support teacher well-being and effective teaching practices.

Newby, P. (2010). Research Methods for Education. Pearson Education.

Pfefferbaum B., North C.S. (2020). Mental health and the Covid-19 pandemic. N. Engl. J. Med.;383(6):510–512.