Research, Funding, and Career Resources

The Corporation for Public Broadcasting evaluates hundreds of proposals each year for a variety of programming and consulting projects and therefore has a great deal of experience in identifying successful proposals. This publication utilizes this experience to provide an easy guide to the basic elements of grant proposal writing for public and private funding, offering guideposts to help writers through each stage of the process.

This site provides tips and resources for successful grant writing. The web site is targeted toward school personnel, but includes practical advice for any first-time grant writer in the education world.

This online overview is designed to help with the basics of developing a project budget, and it is geared for those who have general knowledge of proposal development. Topics include: the basic components of a project budget; different types of financial documents often required for proposals; how overhead costs and fringe benefits may be incorporated within the budget; and how to access resources on the Web that provide templates for project budgets.

Provided by the US Department of Education's Office of Safe and Drug Free Schools, this page provides links to a variety of information including organization tips, budgeting, and sample proposal narratives. It also includes an entire page of definitions of commonly-used proposal-writing terms.

This link will download a rubric which can be used to help individuals decide whether their goals and resources are a good match to a specific grant, and whether they should move forward with their grant writing process.

This page provides information on a series of webinars on research funding opportunities offered by the National Center for Special Education Research (NCSER) and the National Center for Education Research (NCER) within the Institute of Education Sciences (IES). Individuals can learn more and can register to attend the webinars through links provided on the page.

This Guide is intended for faculty and staff members with little or no experience in writing proposals. The brief guide includes information about parts of proposals, how to submit inquires to private foundations, how to deal with short deadlines, and common reasons proposals are rejected.

This page allows users to search among almost 30,000 Federal funding opportunities. Users can create an account to save search criteria related to any of the listed opportunities.

In addition to announcements related to grants and funding, this page also includes a variety of items of public interest, from notices of public meetings to environmental impact statements. Users can create a clipboard of items of specific interest, as well as organize these items into various folders for easy retrieval.

The stated goal of this web site is to make life a little easier for those who devote their time to searching for education grants and identifying new funding opportunities. The website provides links to up-to-date fellowships and grant opportunities from foundations, corporations and the Federal and State governments.

Grants.gov is the source to find and apply for federal grants. Managed by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, the site updates the opportunities weekly and includes grants from all the major Federal funding agencies.

IES has established 11 long-term programs of research in different topics under its Special Education Research Grant Programs at the National Center for Special Education Research (NCSER). Each of these research grant programs accepts applications twice a year.

This site is frequently updated with requests for proposals in education.

The American Speech-Language Hearing Foundation offers a number of research grants to new and current doctoral students in the field of communication sciences and disorders.

The NAE hosts the Spencer Postdoctoral Fellowship Program to support career scholars working to make significant scholarly contributions to the field of education research. The website describes the applicant qualifications and application deadlines.

This organization offers a $1,000 award annually to a recent doctoral graduate as part of its Outstanding Dissertation of the Year Award. Summaries of winning dissertations are also published each year in Reading Research Quarterly.

The William T. Grant Scholars Program supports promising early-career researchers from diverse disciplines, who have demonstrated success in conducting high-quality research and are seeking to further develop and broaden their expertise.

This site includes electronic versions of U.S. Department of Education (ED) records created on or after November 1, 1996. There are redacted copies of actual grant applications from different competitions and offices within ED.

This searchable database allows users to locate information on funded IES projects, using search criteria such as the grantee, project description, and the grant competition title.

This database provides information on the approximately 300 NIDRR grants awarded annually.

This searchable database allows users to search for NIH grants using a wide variety of search criteria. It was developed in February 2011 and was preceded by the Computer Retrieval of Information on Scientific Projects (CRISP).

This database includes information on all current and past NSF grants. Users can search using a range of search criteria, and can also look for information aggregated by program type.

OSEP funds approximately 1,000 grants and contracts each year to improve results for infants, toddlers, children and youth with disabilities ages birth through 21. This website provides up-to-date information on the grants and contracts OSEP has funded as part of its initiatives.

This website provides public access to data about children and youth with disabilities served under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) - Part B and C; technical assistance (TA) materials to support the collection, analysis and reporting of IDEA data; and the forms and spreadsheets used for collection.

The mission of the Data Resource Center (DRC) is to take the voices of parents, gathered through the National Survey of Children's Health (NSCH) and the National Survey of Children with Special Health Care Needs (NS-CSHCN), and share the results through this free online resource. Easy access to children's health data allows researchers, policymakers, family advocates and consumers to work together to promote a higher quality health care system for children, youth and families.

This site, referred to as the Data Accountability Center (DAC), provides public access to data about children and youth with disabilities served under IDEA — Part B and C. In addition, it contains technical assistance (TA) materials to support the collection, analysis and reporting of IDEA data and the forms and spreadsheets used for collection of the data.

NCES is the primary federal entity for collecting and analyzing education-related data. The website has data tools, publications, products and annual reports. Users can access NCES school-level data by school, district, and state, and build custom data tools here: http://nces.ed.gov/datatools/index.asp?DataToolSectionID=4 . In addition, users can obtain information about the annual NCES Summer Forum and Annual STATS-DC Data Conference here: http://ies.ed.gov/whatsnew/conferences/?id=969 .

This page provides a selective list of links to health services resources. It includes links to a large number of national and international databases.

This study is intended to provide a national picture of the experiences and achievements of students in special education during high school and as they transition from high school to adult life. Study data include a nationally representative sample of students who were 13 to 16 years old and receiving special education services in December 2000 when the study began. Data from NLTS-2 are available from IES for restricted use by qualified researchers. Additional information on the project, including reports and products, may be found at: http://www.nlts2.org/ .

This study followed almost 3,000 children with disabilities as they progressed through preschool and into their early elementary years. The study includes data on the preschool and early elementary school experiences of a nationally representative sample of children with disabilities and the outcomes they achieved. Data from PEELS are available from IES for restricted use by qualified researchers.

This database consist of annual reports that provide program and demographic information about the people who receive Social Security disability benefits—disabled workers, disabled widow(er)s, and disabled adult children. Topics covered include beneficiaries in current payment status; benefits awarded, withheld, and terminated; geographic distributions; Social Security beneficiaries who receive Supplemental Security Income; and the income of beneficiaries with disabilities.

Formerly the Office of Applied Studies, this site has primary responsibility for the collection, analysis, and dissemination of behavioral health data. SAMHDA provides public use data files and documentation through downloads to a personal computer or for online analyses using the site's Survey Documentation and Analysis system (SDA).

CALDER’s research focuses most centrally on how teacher policies, governance policies, and social and economic community conditions affect outcomes for teachers and their students. The State Data webpage contains data from Florida, Missouri, New York, North Carolina, Texas, Washington, and select school district from other States. The data compiled primarily pertain to teacher demographics and student level data, although some states have reported higher education information.

The purpose of this site is to assist researchers in the design and analysis of group-randomized trials and in assessing the reliability and validity of measures of social settings. The site's authors created the Optimal Design Software for Multi-Level and Longitudinal Research, which is used for statistical power analysis of group-level interventions and is available for free download from the site.

The Campbell Collaboration (C2) is an international research network that produces systematic reviews of the effects of social interventions. The site includes a searchable database of all the organization's reviews.

CEC's Division for Research established a task force in 2003 to identify quality indicators for research in special education and to provide guidelines for using research as evidence for effective practices in Special Education. This website provides links to the findings of this task force for the four research methodologies used most often in special education: Group, Single Subject, Correlational, and Qualitative Designs.

This searchable database includes links to summaries and abstracts of many scientific journal articles and other resources publishing information on research in various areas of education. Many of the articles also include links to the full text resources.

This guide, provided by the US Department of Education and available in both PDF and HTML formats, provides educational practitioners with user-friendly tools to distinguish practices supported by rigorous evidence from those that are not.

IES's National Center for Education Research (NCER) hosts an annual Summer Research Training Institute on Cluster-Randomized Trials to increase the national capacity of researchers to develop and conduct rigorous evaluations of the effectiveness of education interventions. This site includes video transcripts and presentation files from the 2007 and 2008 Institutes. It also includes information from the Consolidated Standards of Reporting Trials (CONSORT), which provides guidance on the tracking and reporting of critical aspects of randomized controlled trials (RCTs).

This link provides access to presentations from IES-sponsored conferences that highlight the work of, or are relevant to, IES grantees. These presentations particularly pertain to methodological or statistical issues in education research.

The National Postdoctoral Association has posted a Responsible Code of Conduct for Research to guide postdocs in issues of research integrity. This website provides guidance on issues fundamental to a postdoc's professional development and everyday research practice, including determining authorship on publications, taking ownership of data and transitioning to faculty jobs.

At this website is a guide to conducting, planning, or reviewing Regression Discontinuity designs, considered to be one of the most rigorous forms of non-experimental research designs for assessing program impact or effectiveness. The guide, published by Manpower Demonstration Research Corporation (MDRC), describes how to conduct appropriate statistical analyses and other issues in implementing this design, and provides checklists and a sample data set. MDRC conducted this work with support from the Institute of Education Sciences, U.S. Department of Education.

The Institute of Education Sciences (IES) provides links to a variety of current training and preparation opportunities. It also includes a sidebar of links to pre- and postdoctoral training programs provided by universities across the country.

The Single Case Research website is designed to provide access to current work on single case research design and analysis through the posting of published papers, manuscripts in press and white papers. In addition free calculators are provided for aiding non-visual analysis of these data. Free instructional videos on a variety of analysis topics are also available.

This organization provides the Cochrane Reviews, systematic reviews of primary research in human health care and health policy recognized as the highest standard in evidence-based health care. These reviews are published online in The Cochrane Library.

Published by the Cornell Office for Research and Evaluation, this website provides resources and links to other locations on the Web that deal in applied social research methods and evaluation.

Funded by the National Center for Educational Statistics (NCES), this program develops standards that ensure the quality of statistical surveys, analyses and products. This webpage is the table of contents of hyperlinks which lead to the most recent version of statistical standards.

As an initiative of the U.S. Department of Education's Institute of Education Sciences (IES), the What Works Clearinghouse (WWC) was created in 2002 to be a central and trusted source of scientific evidence for what works in education. The WWC also contains guidance on how to evaluate research.

The Federal Government has taken steps to help students and recent graduates join the Federal service. New opportunities will appear on this USAJOBS site as agencies post them. This link also contains information on the Recent Graduates program, which was developed to promote possible careers in the civil service to individuals who have recently graduated from qualifying educational institutions or programs. To be eligible, applicants must apply within two years of degree or certificate completion (except for veterans precluded from doing so due to their military service obligation, who will...

The CEC’s Career Center allows users to post their resumes, sign up for job alerts, store and manage viewed job postings, and provides career development tools. In addition a comprehensive job search is available, where seekers can filter opportunities by: state/province, category, level, type, country, and education. Users can also set up alerts to be sent directly via email.

This website’s Job Center allows users to search or browse different types of jobs; faculty/research, administrative, executive, and jobs outside academe. The Chronicle’s homepage also has links to national and international news related to the field of higher education, career management tools and advice , and forums to connect with others in the field. In addition, the Chronicle recently launched Vitae , an online career hub exclusively for higher education.

This job database is operated by Education Week and contains teaching, administrative and district-level positions. There is no login information required to search jobs, and users may create a free account to upload their resumes and cover letters. This site also contains career resources and a detailed state comparison of teacher salaries and certification requirements .

The Federal Government has taken steps to help students and recent graduates join the Federal service. New opportunities will appear on this USAJOBS site as agencies post them. This link also contains information on the Recent Graduates program, which was developed to promote possible careers in the civil service to individuals who have recently graduated from qualifying educational institutions or programs. To be eligible, applicants must apply within two years of degree or certificate completion (except for veterans precluded from doing so due to their military service obligation, who will...

This site provides a free job search tool, disaggregated by category, location, type, and specialty. In addition, career news and tools include updates about the higher ed job market, tools for career planning and tips for working at colleges and universities. The website was founded by university employees and during 2012, more than 5,370 colleges and universities posted over 116,850 faculty, administrative and executive job postings to this website.

This organization works to address the many issues confronting the postdoctoral community. This website has a number of publications, resources and scheduled meetings to support career development for postdoctoral students.

OSEP offers non-paid internship opportunities to current doctoral students in its Research to Practice (RTP) division. Internships generally last at least six weeks in length, and you must be willing to work on-site in our Washington, DC, office. Based on your research interests, you will be matched with an RTP employee, who will then work with you to determine specific internship projects. Unfortunately, we are not able to accommodate requests for remote internships. For further information about this opportunity and how to apply, please contact Leah Zimmerman .

The IRIS Center develops modules and other instructional resources to be used by faculty and professional development providers for the preparation of current and future school personnel. The Center works with experts from across the nation to create challenge-based interactive modules, case study units, and a variety of activities, the purpose of which is to provide research-validated information about working with students with disabilities in inclusive settings. All IRIS materials are available free of charge through this site.

This site has an employment page with links to a number of national education job search banks. In addition, the Center lists links to State employment job banks for 35 U.S. States and territories.

This website has number of resources for graduates entering the workplace. The Careers for the Common Good is a list of opportunities that can be filtered by Post-Graduate Experiences, Career & Job, Graduate School, Professional Development and Civic Engagement. This list is not specific to the special education field, but does include working with students with disabilities. In addition, there are job search videos with practical advice for new PhDs looking for jobs.

This link goes to a .pdf of suggestions made by Stanford Ph.D. alumni to post-docs, with advice on career planning.