This project continues the work of the AERA Grants Program, which provides competitive research grants to both doctoral students and education research scientists who conduct secondary analyses of large-scale national and international data sets from the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES). The project also will carry out two new strands of work: (1) through a partnership with the National Center for Analysis of Longitudinal Data in Education Research, managed by the Urban Institute, the project enables access to and use of state longitudinal data bases for scientific research on student learning, performance, and achievement in STEM; and (2) a programmatic component to foster secondary analysis of data emerging from NSF-funded investigator-initiated STEM projects that have opportunities for further discovery will be explored.
The AERA Grants Program seeks to increase the capacity of the STEM education field to conduct high quality research using large-scale data sets through its grants, the findings from workshops, and the publications resulting from "think tank" activities that explore critical issues in STEM education research.