Research and Evaluation on Education in Science and Engineering | Apply Online

Opportunity Summary:

The National Science Foundation (NSF), through its Directorate for Education and Human Resources (EHR) and the Division of Research on Learning in Formal and Informal Settings (DRL), offered the Research and Evaluation on Education in Science and Engineering (REESE) grant program to support both basic and applied work that strengthens STEM learning and teaching. At its core, REESE is designed to push the boundaries of what is known about how people learn science, technology, engineering, and mathematics, and to build the kind of rigorous evidence base that can meaningfully improve STEM education across the full lifespan and in every kind of learning environment. That includes traditional classrooms and schools, but also informal and emerging contexts such as museums, afterschool programs, online environments, workplaces, and other settings where STEM learning happens outside of formal instruction.

The solicitation emphasizes three interconnected program goals. First, it aims to catalyze discovery and innovation at the frontiers of STEM learning, education, and evaluation, meaning it is interested in research that tackles fundamental questions and opens up new directions rather than simply confirming what is already known. Second, it seeks to raise the overall quality and robustness of education research by advancing theory, improving methods, and strengthening the human resource pipeline, which includes developing researchers and building capacity for stronger future work. Third, it aims to help coordinate and transform progress across education, learning sciences, and evaluation, essentially encouraging a more integrated field where advances in one area inform and accelerate progress in others.

REESE specifically calls for three types of proposals, which represent different ways to contribute to those goals. Knowledge Diffusion proposals focus on spreading, translating, synthesizing, or otherwise moving high-quality research knowledge into broader use by the field, helping ensure that important findings do not stay siloed within a small group of experts. Empirical Research proposals support original, data-driven studies that investigate key questions about STEM learning and education, including the mechanisms of learning, instructional design, learning technologies, and other factors shaping outcomes. Large Empirical Research proposals are meant for bigger, more ambitious projects that typically require greater scale, longer time horizons, more complex designs, or broader collaborations to generate findings with stronger generalizability and influence.

A defining feature of the program is its strong interdisciplinary orientation. REESE is not limited to one academic discipline or one methodological tradition; instead it encourages portfolios that bring together expertise from STEM disciplinary fields, education research, learning sciences, psychology, sociology, measurement, statistics, and evaluation, among others. The program highlights that research on educational research methodology and evaluation is not peripheral but central, signaling interest in better research designs, improved measurement and assessment, stronger causal inference where appropriate, and more credible evaluation approaches that can withstand scrutiny and be replicated or built upon.

The program also places notable importance on involving early-career talent and building the next generation of researchers. It explicitly values the participation of doctoral students, postdoctoral scholars, and early-career investigators, along with the involvement of STEM disciplinary experts, reflecting a dual commitment to workforce development and to grounding education research in deep content expertise. In practical terms, competitive projects under REESE would be expected to show not only strong research questions and designs, but also thoughtful plans for collaboration, mentoring, and developing research capacity.

From an administrative and funding standpoint, this was a discretionary NSF grant opportunity (Funding Opportunity Number 08-585) in the Science and Technology and other Research and Development category, listed under CFDA 47.076 (Education and Human Resources). NSF anticipated making around 45 awards with an estimated total funding level of $30,000,000, and it did not require cost sharing or matching. Eligibility was described as unrestricted (open to any type of entity, subject to any additional eligibility clarifications in the full solicitation). Key dates included an optional letter of intent due by October 9, 2009, and a full proposal deadline of November 12, 2009 (with an earlier full proposal deadline also listed as November 21, 2008 for a prior cycle). The opportunity was posted March 4, 2009, and later archived on March 5, 2010, indicating it is no longer accepting applications, though it remains a useful reference point for NSF priorities and the kinds of STEM education research and evaluation work the agency has historically sought to fund.

Overall, REESE can be understood as NSF's mechanism for advancing high-impact, methodologically strong STEM education research and evaluation, with an emphasis on frontier questions, interdisciplinary collaboration, and building both knowledge and capacity that can improve STEM learning from early childhood through professional life. For full details, the solicitation points to NSF Publication 08-585, and applicants or readers needing technical access support were directed to NSF's grants.gov support channel.

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