Grants of $50,000 to Support Education Improvement Projects from the Spencer Foundation

The Spencer Foundation is offering grants to support research projects that will improve education on a large scale. This program supports proposals from multiple disciplinary and methodological perspectives, both domestically and internationally, from scholars at various stages in their career. We anticipate that proposals will span a wide range of topics and disciplines that innovatively investigate questions central to education, including for example education, anthropology, philosophy, psychology, sociology, law, economics, history, or neuroscience, amongst others.

The Small Research Grants Program supports education research projects that will contribute to the improvement of education, broadly conceived, with budgets up to $50,000 for projects ranging from one to five years.

• Proposals to the Research Grants on Education program must be for academic research projects that aim to study education. Proposals for activities other than research are not eligible (e.g., program evaluations, professional development, curriculum development, scholarships). Additionally, proposals for research studies focused on areas other than education, are not eligible.
• Principal Investigators (PIs) applying for a Small Research Grant on Education must have an earned doctorate in an academic discipline or professional field or appropriate experience in an education research-related profession. While graduate students may be part of the research team.
• The PI must be affiliated with a non-profit organization or public/governmental institution that is willing to serve as the administering organization if the grant is awarded. The Spencer Foundation does not award grants directly to individuals.
• Proposals are accepted from the U.S. and internationally, however, all proposals must be submitted in English and budgets must be proposed in U.S. Dollars.
• Projects proposed may not be longer than 5 years in duration.
• PIs may only hold one active research grant from the Spencer Foundation at a time. (This restriction does not apply to the administering organization; organizations may submit as many proposals as they like as long as they are for different projects and have different research teams.)
• PIs and Co-PIs may not submit more than one research proposal to the Spencer Foundation at a time.

Selection Criteria:

Each proposal will be reviewed by both external panel reviewers and internal staff. The review process for this program takes approximately 6-7 months from the deadline date.

Panelists are asked to rate and comment on the following aspects of your proposal:

• Significance of the Project: Reviewers will evaluate the centrality of education in the research, the importance of the topic to its field, and the quality of the research question(s) and/or direction of inquiry.
• Connection to Research and Theory: Reviewers will evaluate the adequacy of the description of how other researchers have treated the same topic and how well the proposal responds to prior work and theory.
• Research Design: Reviewers will evaluate the overall quality, sophistication, and appropriateness of the research design as well as its alignment with the research question(s) and/or conceptual framing.
• Budget and Timeline: Reviewers will evaluate the adequacy of the budget and timeline.
• Project Team: Reviewers will comment on the potential of the investigator(s) to complete the study as described and share the results or other findings.

About Spencer:

Founded in 1962 by American scientist Lil Spencer, the Spencer Foundation aims to find and harness various methods for improving education and advancing science on a large scale worldwide. The Spencer Foundation received its first major donation after the death of the scientist Spencer in 1968, at which time the Foundation began to officially provide research grants in 1971, and since then the Foundation has provided grants totaling nearly $500 million. The Foundation has been dedicated from the beginning to believe that research and its support is important to improving education, that is why the Foundation has the honor to support the development of the educational system to be of high quality through its research programs.

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