[Federal Register Volume 66, Number 242 (Monday, December 17, 2001)]
[Notices]
[Pages 65082-65086]
From the Federal Register Online via the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]
[FR Doc No: 01-31127]



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Part IV





Department of Education





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Office of Educational Research and Improvement (OERI): Preschool 
Curriculum Evaluation Research Grant Program Inviting Applications for 
New Awards for Fiscal Year (FY) 2002; Notice

  Federal Register / Vol. 66, No. 242 / Monday, December 17, 2001 / 
Notices  

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DEPARTMENT OF EDUCATION

[CFDA No. 84.305J]


Office of Educational Research and Improvement (OERI): Preschool 
Curriculum Evaluation Research Grant Program Notice Inviting 
Applications for New Awards for Fiscal Year (FY) 2002

    Purpose of Program: The purpose of this program is to implement 
rigorous evaluations of preschool curricula that will provide 
information to support informed choices of classroom curricula for 
early childhood programs. This competition will focus support on a new 
program of research that will determine, through randomized clinical 
trials, whether one or more curricula produce educationally meaningful 
effects on children.
    Eligible Applicants: Public and private agencies, institutions, and 
organizations, including for-profit and non-profit organizations; 
institutions of higher education; State and local education agencies; 
and regional educational laboratories.
    Deadline for Receipt of Letter of Intent: January 15, 2002.
    A Letter of Intent is optional, but encouraged, for each 
application. The Letter of Intent is for OERI planning purposes and 
will not be used in the evaluation of the application.
    Applications Available: December 17, 2001.
    Deadline for Transmittal of Applications: March 15, 2002.
    Estimated Available Funds: Up to $4,000,000 for the first year of 
this program.
    The estimated amount of funds available for new awards is based on 
the Administration's request for this program for FY 2002. The actual 
level of funding, if any, depends on final congressional action. 
However, we are inviting applications to allow enough time to complete 
the grant process if Congress appropriates funds for this program.
    Estimated Size of Awards: Funds available per award will depend on 
the sample size, the nature of the supplemental research proposed, and 
any non-federal resources to be devoted to the project. We expect to be 
able to make about 10 awards and that a typical first year award, with 
the minimal sample size, described subsequently, will be approximately 
$350,000.
    Estimated Number of Awards: 10.


    Note: The Department is not bound by any estimates in this 
notice.


    Project Period: Up to 48 months.
    Page Limits: The application must include the following sections: 
title page form (ED 424), one-page abstract, research narrative, 
literature cited, curriculum vitae for principal investigator(s) and 
other key personnel, budget summary form (ED 524) with budget 
narrative, appendix, and statement of equitable access (GEPA 427). The 
research narrative is where you, the applicant, address the selection 
criteria that reviewers use to evaluate your application. You must 
limit the research narrative (text plus all figures, charts, tables, 
and diagrams) to the equivalent of 25 pages and the appendix to 20 
pages, using the following standards:
     A ``page'' is 8.5" x 11", on one side only, with 1" 
margins at the top, bottom, and both sides.
     Double space (no more than three lines per vertical inch) 
all text in the research narrative, including titles, headings, 
footnotes, quotations, references, and captions, as well as all text in 
charts, tables, figures, and graphs.
     Use a font that is either 12-point or larger or no smaller 
than 10 pitch (characters per inch).
    The page limit does not apply to the title page form, the one-page 
abstract, the budget summary form and narrative budget justification, 
the curriculum vitae, literature cited, or the assurances and 
certifications.
    Our reviewers will not read any pages of your application that--
     Exceed the page limit if you apply these standards; or
     Exceed the equivalent of the page limit if you apply other 
standards.
    We have found that reviewers are able to conduct the highest 
quality review when applications are concise and easy to read, with 
pages consecutively numbered.
    Applicable Statute and Regulations: (a) 20 U.S.C. 6031; (b) The 
Education Department General Administrative Regulations (EDGAR) in 34 
CFR parts 74, 75 (except as limited in 34 CFR 700.5), 77, 80, 81, 82, 
85, 86 (part 86 applies only to Institutions of Higher Education), 97, 
98, and 99; and (c) The regulations in 34 CFR part 700.
    Selection Criteria: The Secretary selects the following selection 
criteria in 34 CFR 700.30(e) to evaluate applications for new grants 
under this competition. The criteria below will receive the following 
percentage weights.

(a) National Significance (.2)
(b) Quality of the Project Design (.5)
(c) Quality and Potential Contributions of Personnel (.2)
(d) Adequacy of Resources (.1)

    Strong applications for Preschool Curriculum Evaluation Research 
(PCER) grants clearly address each of the applicable selection 
criteria. They make a well-reasoned and compelling case for the 
national significance of the problems or issues that will be the 
subject of the proposed research, and present a research design that is 
complete, clearly delineated, and incorporates sound research methods. 
In addition, the personnel descriptions included in strong applications 
make it apparent that the project director, principal investigator, and 
other key personnel possess training and experience commensurate with 
their duties.
    Pre-Application Meeting: We will hold a pre-application meeting on 
January 24, 2002, to discuss the funding priority. You are invited to 
participate. You will receive technical assistance and information 
about the funding priority. The meeting will be held at the U.S. 
Department of Education, Office of Educational Research and 
Improvement, 555 New Jersey Avenue, NW., room 101, Washington, DC, 
between 1 p.m. and 4 p.m. A summary of the meeting will be posted on 
the Internet at: 
http://www.ed.gov/offices/OERI 

Assistance to Individuals With Disabilities at the Meeting

    The meeting site is accessible to individuals with disabilities. If 
you will need an auxiliary aid or service to participate in the meeting 
(e.g., interpreting service, assistive listening device, or materials 
in an alternate format), notify the contact person listed under FOR 
APPLICATIONS AND FURTHER INFORMATION CONTACT at least two weeks before 
the scheduled meeting date. Although we will attempt to meet a request 
we receive after that date, we may not be able to make available the 
requested auxiliary aid or service because of insufficient time to 
arrange it.

SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION:

Background

    Research has long established the importance of early experiences 
in supporting successful child development. More recently, the focus 
has turned to the role of early child-care and preschool experiences in 
supporting cognitive development and other skills that are essential 
for successful transition into school. Policy makers have begun to 
respond to the mounting evidence of the importance of early experience 
with calls to provide better quality preschool programs. For example, 
The National Research Council's 2000 report, Eager to Learn, concluded 
that: ``Many children,

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especially those in low-income households, are served in child care 
programs of such low quality that learning and development are not 
enhanced and may even be jeopardized.'' Furthermore, the First Lady's 
White House Summit on Early Childhood Cognitive Development, held in 
2001, called attention to the need for preschool programs to enhance 
their instructional content in the area of early cognition and pre-
reading skills. One result of the Early Childhood Cognitive Development 
Summit was the formation of an Interagency Task Force in Early 
Childhood Development involving representatives from the U.S. 
Department of Education, Health and Human Services, and the National 
Institute of Child Health and Human Development. This funding 
announcement is one product of that Task Force.
    The evidence that would allow informed choices of classroom 
curricula for early childhood programs is weak. When rigorous preschool 
program evaluations exist, they are for programs designed and delivered 
decades ago. Most currently available curricula have no link to those 
historical programs, and those that do have changed in content and 
method of delivery as they have evolved over the years. While the 
results from historical evaluations of preschool curricula and current 
research on the learning and development of young children provide some 
insights into general features of successful preschool programs, they 
give little guidance for selecting from among the ever-expanding list 
of available preschool curricula. For example, the State of Georgia, 
which has a universal pre-K program, allows providers to choose among 
seven different nationally available curricula. There is little 
evidence that would allow providers to make an informed choice among 
these curricula. New York, another state providing universal pre-K, 
does not provide a list of approved curricula. Instead it requires that 
approved providers deliver a curriculum that conforms to general 
guidelines such as meeting ``the social, cognitive, linguistic, 
emotional, cultural and physical needs of all eligible children.'' 
However, there is little evidence for choosing among curriculum options 
based on such guidelines. The Preschool Curriculum Evaluation Research 
(PCER) grants are intended to address the lack of rigorous, systematic 
evaluation of preschool curricula that are currently in use for 
children in the pre-K years.
    PCER is intended to build on recent initiatives aimed at evaluating 
the preschool experiences of children. In 1997, Head Start undertook 
The Family and Child Experiences Survey (FACES), a large-scale national 
study of Head Start programs. FACES is a national longitudinal study of 
the cognitive, social, emotional, and physical development of children; 
the characteristics, well-being, and accomplishments of their families; 
the observed characteristics of their classrooms; and the 
characteristics, needs, and opinions of their teachers and other 
program staff. In addition, the Early Childhood Longitudinal Survey-
Kindergarten (ECLS-K) and the Early Childhood Longitudinal Survey-Birth 
Cohort (ECLS-B), both ongoing projects of the National Center for 
Education Statistics within OERI, offer additional insight into how to 
measure family, school, and individual variables using a set of 
measures that overlap substantially with the FACES measures. The FACES 
measures will form the core set of indicators used in PCER funded 
projects.
    The outcomes of greatest interest to PCER are those skills that are 
most highly predictive of academic success in the early years of 
elementary school and that are most amenable to influence by factors 
within the realm of classroom curricula and practice. These outcomes 
include language development, pre-reading and pre-math abilities, 
cognition, general knowledge, and social competence.
    The curricula of primary interest to PCER are those with sufficient 
standardized training procedures and published curriculum materials to 
support implementation of the curriculum by entities other than and at 
a distance from the curriculum developers. In addition, the curricula 
of interest to PCER are those that focus on the child outcomes 
described above, and those with instructional approaches that find 
support in the scientific literature on learning and instruction. These 
will be existing curricula that are already in use in a number of 
sites. PCER is not intended to support the development of new 
curricula; that will be the focus of other programs of research to be 
sponsored by the Interagency Task Force.

Program Description

    Grantees will coordinate with a national evaluation contractor (to 
be funded separately by OERI) to ensure that evaluations carried out in 
different locations follow consistent protocols and use a core set of 
comparable measures. The national contractor will be responsible for 
collecting pre- and post-intervention data and kindergarten and first 
grade follow-up data on children and classrooms, and for analysis and 
reporting of these data across program sites. This type of centralized 
data coordination mechanism has been found to be important in 
maximizing the systematic collection of cross-site knowledge obtained 
from multiple research projects. The cross-site data will be returned 
to applicants in a timely manner to serve as a basis for local analyses 
(as part of any complementary research), as well as eventually made 
available in public use datasets. Additional local measures and data 
analysis of implementation and outcomes may be carried out by the 
applicants as part of complementary research projects (described 
subsequently) using program funds. This arrangement allows applicants 
to consider more intensive data collection approaches to augment the 
available core measures. Cooperative agreement budgets should include 
costs of data collection for local measures, assuming a common core of 
data to be provided by the external data collection center without cost 
to the grantee.
    The core set of evaluation data collected by the national 
contractor will utilize FACES instruments to measure both classroom and 
family characteristics and practices, and child outcomes. Children, 
parents and preschool staff participate in data collection. In 
addition, the preschool classrooms are assessed by outside observers. 
The FACES instruments cover a range of areas. The primary focus is on 
child outcomes, including cognitive outcomes assessed using standard 
instruments such as the Woodcock-Johnson Letter Word Identification, 
and socio-emotional outcomes such as social skills ratings completed by 
the teacher. For purposes of calculating participant burden, the 
current FACES child direct assessment is completed in approximately 30 
minutes per child. For a full listing of the measures used in the 1997-
2000 FACES study, please see http://www2.acf.dhhs.gov/programs/hsb/hsreac/faces/instruments.html.
    Applicants must consider methods for assessing the characteristics 
of the preschool program(s), including those programs that serve as 
controls. Such methods could examine such factors as allocation of time 
during the preschool day, nature of interactions between children and 
teacher, and fidelity of the curriculum implementation.
    Applicants may also propose complementary research studies to 
further our knowledge of the mechanisms by which curricula support 
children's learning, including the

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development of new instruments to measure processes related to the 
effects of curriculum and instruction on learning and development in 
young children. The complementary research may address a range of 
issues related broadly to curriculum effectiveness such as the impact 
of curriculum implementation on preschool staff, the influence of 
individual differences in children on program impact, the development 
of instrumentation, or other related topics.
    The complementary research studies are intended to supplement, 
complement and enrich the core evaluation. Investigators will have an 
opportunity to explore mediating events or the theoretical pathways 
that explain the results that are obtained in the evaluation. In 
addition, complementary research provides an opportunity to identify 
outcomes that, because of data constraints, are not explored in the 
core evaluation or are specific to an individual site. It also expands 
the possibilities for multiple measures of the same construct, and for 
the development of new measures.
    Two areas of complementary research are of particular interest:
    (1) Studies that address how individual or background differences 
in children interact with the curriculum to influence developmental 
outcomes. Such studies would address the question, for which children 
under which conditions is the curriculum most successful?
    (2) Studies that compare different versions of the curriculum or 
different approaches to implementation in order to identify key 
features of the curriculum and approaches that might improve 
effectiveness and ease of implementation. Such studies would address 
the question, under what circumstances does the curriculum achieve the 
greatest impact?
    Specific complementary research questions might include:
    Individual differences: How are age, gender, language, disability, 
and other key child characteristics, as well as cultural issues, 
addressed? How do family characteristics interact with the child's 
preschool experience to influence school readiness? To what populations 
are evaluation results likely to be generalizable? For which children 
is the curriculum most effective/least effective and why?
    Replication/dissemination: What variations in context, target 
populations, and program delivery might affect implementation in other 
sites, and how might they affect the outcomes of the curriculum? To 
what extent does the curriculum have to be modified to adapt to local 
conditions? What are the key elements that have to be sustained to 
maintain effectiveness of the curriculum?
    Classroom, program, and community context: What are the structures 
and supports necessary to implement the curriculum? What are the key 
activities that are conducted to include or gain support from community 
stakeholders and collaborators, with program administrators and policy 
councils, with classroom teachers and other staff, with parents of 
children in the classrooms? What are the contextual variables that 
might influence how the curriculum is implemented: e.g., culture, 
neighborhood characteristics, organizational climate, level of poverty 
in the community, teacher backgrounds, education, motivation, skills 
and attitudes, levels of support (financial and otherwise), competing 
priorities within a program or classroom, management and organizational 
structures? What are the relationships among the individuals who are 
stakeholders and/or participants in the curriculum?
    Grantees will be required to propose a research and evaluation work 
plan that will be negotiated between the applicant and OERI and updated 
on a yearly basis. The work plan proposed by the applicant will include 
details of how the evaluation will be implemented, e.g., the number of 
classrooms, their characteristics, their existing approach, how 
training will be provided, how randomization will occur, how informed 
consent will be obtained. A work plan is also necessary for the 
complementary research, if such research is proposed by the applicant. 
The evaluation portion of each PCER's proposed work plan will be 
reviewed by OERI and the national evaluation contractor before the 
final evaluation plan is approved.

Time Frame

    PCER projects will be funded for up to a four-year period. 
Evaluation designs should include both short term and long term 
outcomes. Initial results are expected at the end of the first year of 
curriculum implementation. Long term outcomes should include follow-up 
into kindergarten and first grade. Applicants should plan for an 
implementation in pre-K classrooms in year 1, follow-up into 
kindergarten in year 2, follow-up into first grade in year 3, and 
completion of data analysis and reports in year four. Complementary 
research designs could involve continued pre-K implementations and 
ongoing research in the pre-K setting for some or all years of the 
grant, while children in the first cohort are being followed up into 
first grade.
    In the event that a PCER project does not generate meaningful 
differences between intervention and control classrooms in terms of 
children's outcomes at the end of year 1, and when this lack of effect 
appears to be attributable to unforeseen and remediable problems in 
implementation, grantees will be given a second year of funding to 
repeat a pre-K implementation of their selected curriculum. When 
curriculum effects on children's outcomes are not obtained at the end 
of the pre-K year, and this lack of effect appears to be a valid 
indicator of program ineffectiveness, grantees will be encouraged to 
implement and evaluate curricula that have proven effective as deployed 
by other grantees.

Type of Awards

    OERI will use a cooperative agreement mechanism that allows 
substantial Federal involvement in the activities undertaken with 
Federal financial support. Details of the responsibilities, 
relationships and governance of the cooperative agreement will be 
elaborated in the terms and conditions of the award. The specific 
responsibilities of the Federal staff and project staff will be 
identified and agreed upon prior to the award of each cooperative 
agreement.

Priority

    This competition focuses on projects designed to meet the following 
absolute priority. Under 34 CFR 75.105(c)(3) we consider only 
applications that meet this priority.

Absolute Priority

    The preschool curriculum evaluation research grants are designed to 
determine through a randomized clinical trial whether one or more 
curricula produce educationally meaningful effects on children's 
outcomes. Each grantee must implement one or more identified pre-K 
curricula, including attention to fidelity of the curriculum 
implementation; and coordinate with a national contractor the 
assessment of children and classrooms in the fall and spring of the 
pre-K year, and in the spring of the kindergarten and first grade year.
    Specifically, successful applicants must:
    (1) Obtain agreement of a sufficient number of preschool sites to 
participate in the study;
    (2) Obtain agreement of the cooperating sites to random assignment 
of children or classrooms to the

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curriculum being evaluated versus one or more comparison approaches;
    (3) Obtain informed consent of parents of children participating in 
the study, and all teachers and other administrators from whom data 
will be collected;
    (4) Provide all necessary materials and professional development to 
teachers and staff to implement the curriculum to be evaluated in the 
intervention classrooms;
    (5) Make all on-site arrangements necessary for the national 
contractor to conduct assessments of participating children and 
classrooms;
    (6) Obtain parent and teacher interview data; and
    (7) Provide an on-site coordinator to manage all aspects of data 
collection, curriculum implementation, and interaction with the 
national contractor.
    Complementary research projects may be embedded within the 
evaluation design or include additional data collection activities. 
However, activities related to the complementary research must not 
compromise the core evaluation responsibilities and are not required in 
order to receive funding.
    Applicants who are research organizations are free to involve 
curriculum developers or distributors in the project as they think 
best, from having the curriculum developers as full partners in their 
proposals to utilizing off-the-shelf curriculum materials without 
involvement of the developer or publisher. Involvement of the 
curriculum developer or distributor must not jeopardize the objectivity 
of the evaluation and must not involve a level of professional training 
or support for the curriculum that rises above that available to 
ordinary adopters of the curriculum. Applicants who are not research 
organizations will need to obtain the services of at least one 
consultant who is an established researcher and who has committed 
enough time to the project to assure the integrity of the local 
evaluation and to participate in all required meetings. Applicants who 
are commercial curriculum developers should indicate in the budget 
summary the value of any nonfederal resources that will be devoted to 
the research project, such as their curriculum products.
    Applicants must employ random assignment in the evaluation design. 
Preschool program(s) that are to be the sites for curriculum 
implementation must agree to cooperate fully with the random assignment 
as a condition for the applicant to receive an award under this 
announcement. In order to facilitate random assignment, applicants are 
encouraged to consider the use of incentives for schools and families. 
These may include: Compensation for additional preschool staff time 
required to cooperate with the research effort; funding for a new 
classroom; provision of additional resources to enable a program to 
conduct new activities; securing vehicles for transportation; stipends 
to families, etc.
    In proposing a curriculum for evaluation and in the evaluation 
design, applicants should consider the following questions:
    (1) What scientific research supports the use of this particular 
curriculum to improve school readiness or other identified outcomes?
    (2) What levels of staff qualifications are required?
    (3) What training and materials are needed?
    (4) What are the costs of the curriculum in terms of materials and 
professional training and support?
    (5) How is classroom or program practice to be affected?
    (6) How will fidelity of the curriculum be maintained over the 
program year?
    (7) What are possible program staff or family barriers to 
acceptance?
    Applicants need to pay special attention to the nature of the 
curriculum or approach that will be used in control classrooms. 
Successful applicants for this initial round of PCER awards are not 
expected to compare different well-articulated well-implemented 
preschool curricula, though such applications are not discouraged. 
Rather, we expect the typical applicant to propose to implement a well 
articulated, well-implemented curriculum in preschools in which the 
prevailing approach is a home grown, garden variety, unlabeled 
preschool experience that is short on specific instructional goals and 
that lacks a detailed curriculum. That existing practice would continue 
in the classrooms randomized into the control condition. Applicants who 
propose a control condition in which the curriculum is one that might 
well be proposed as the intervention condition by another applicant 
should provide a convincing rationale for their intervention being 
likely to improve children's outcomes compared with the known effects 
of the curriculum used in the control condition. In this regard and for 
all the projects, the ethics of random assignment require a reasonable 
assumption that children in the intervention classrooms will experience 
neutral to positive outcomes compared with children in the control 
classrooms, rather than negative outcomes.
    Because children who are most unprepared for entry into school are 
found disproportionately among low-income households, and because 
variations in the quality of preschool programs appear to have their 
greatest effects among such children, applicants must either focus on 
preschools that serve children from low-income backgrounds or assure 
that such children are present in significant numbers within the 
preschool classrooms that are sampled.
    Applicants will follow children who participate in studies of PCER 
curricula that generate educationally meaningful effects at the end of 
the pre-K year into kindergarten and first grade. Assessment of 
children at follow-up in both the intervention and control conditions 
will be the responsibility of the national contractor. However, all 
arrangements to allow such assessments to occur, including obtaining 
parent permission and negotiating access to children for testing in 
their schools, will be the responsibility of the successful applicant. 
Applicants must address how they will provide access to children for 
follow-up testing.
    Applicants must be able to guarantee access to a minimum of 10 
classrooms with a total of 150 children. Children included must be in 
the age range such that they would be eligible for entrance into public 
kindergarten in the following year. In addition, the evaluation design 
must include attention to the following:
    (1) Description of the control condition and the intervention 
condition(s).
    (2) Explanation of procedures for random assignment and discussion 
of procedures for tracking fidelity to the assignment and potential 
sources of contamination.
    (3) Logic of sampling so as to capture, to the degree possible, 
diversity in the preschool population studied. Core variables to 
consider for capturing diversity include: race, ethnicity/language 
status; household income; parental education.
    (4) Discussion of possible variations in the structure of the 
participating preschool program(s) (part-day or full day, public or 
private, profit or non-profit, etc.) and how these variations will be 
taken into consideration in the evaluation design.
    Applicants must provide a letter of cooperation from participating 
preschool programs for the purposes of conducting the research, with 
the responsibilities of the preschool program clearly indicated and 
accepted in the letter of cooperation. The applicant must be willing to 
work with the national evaluation contractor for the collection of 
cross-site data, in

[[Page 65086]]

coordination with any local data collection activities. The principal 
investigator must agree to attend up to four meetings each year of the 
grantees, contractor, and Federal staff. The budget should reflect 
travel funds for such purposes.

Waiver of Proposed Rulemaking

    Under the Administrative Procedure Act (5 U.S.C. 553) the 
Department generally offers interested parties the opportunity to 
comment on proposed regulations. However, in order to make timely grant 
awards in FY 2002, the Secretary has decided to issue this application 
notice without first publishing a proposed priority for public comment. 
These regulations will apply to the FY 2002 grant competition only. The 
Secretary takes this action under section 437(d)(1) of the General 
Education Provisions Act.
    OERI is conducting its first grant competition under the national 
research institutes authority for the purpose of funding projects that 
will implement rigorous evaluations of classroom curricula currently in 
use for the pre-K years (20 U.S.C. 6031). This new program of research 
is intended to address the critical question of which curricula produce 
or contribute to educationally meaningful outcomes for children of this 
age. As noted earlier, the evidence that would allow informed choices 
of classroom curricula for early childhood programs is weak or non-
existent. Thus, for the first time, OERI is soliciting applications 
that will address the lack of rigorous, systematic study and evaluation 
of existing curricula.
    In a separate Federal Register notice to be published in the near 
future, the Assistant Secretary will ask for public comment on the 
priority for the purpose of designing and conducting future grant 
competitions for this research.

FOR APPLICATIONS AND FURTHER INFORMATION CONTACT: Heidi Schweingruber, 
U.S. Department of Education, 555 New Jersey Avenue, room 602-O, 
Washington, DC 20208-5501. Telephone: (202) 219-2040 or via Internet: 
[email protected].
    If you use a telecommunications device for the deaf (TDD), you may 
call the Federal Information Relay Service (FIRS) at 1-800-877-8339.
    Individuals with disabilities may obtain this document in an 
alternative format (e.g., Braille, large print, audiotape, or computer 
diskette) on request to the program contact person listed under FOR 
APPLICATIONS AND FURTHER INFORMATION CONTACT.
    Individuals with disabilities may obtain a copy of the application 
package in an alternative format by contacting Heidi Schweingruber. 
However, the Department is not able to reproduce in an alternative 
format the standard forms included in the application package.

Pilot Project for Electronic Submission of Applications

    In FY 2002, the U.S. Department of Education is continuing to 
expand its pilot project of electronic submission of applications to 
include additional formula grant programs and additional discretionary 
grant competitions. The Preschool Curriculum Evaluation Research Grant 
Program (CFDA 84.305J) is one of the programs included in the pilot 
project. If you are an applicant under the PCER program, you may submit 
your application to us in either electronic or paper format.
    The pilot project involves the use of the Electronic Grant 
Application System (e-APPLICATION, formerly e-GAPS) portion of the 
Grant Administration and Payment System (GAPS). We request your 
participation in this pilot project. We shall continue to evaluate its 
success and solicit suggestions for improvement.
    If you participate in this e-APPLICATION pilot, please note the 
following:
     Your participation is voluntary.
     You will not receive any additional point value or penalty 
because you submit a grant application in electronic or paper format.
     You can submit all documents electronically, including the 
Application for Federal Assistance (ED 424), Budget Information--Non-
Construction Programs (ED 524), and all necessary assurances and 
certifications.
     Within three working days of submitting your electronic 
application, fax a signed copy of the Application for Federal 
Assistance (ED 424) to the Application Control Center after following 
these steps:
    1. Print ED 424 from the e-APPLICATION system.
    2. Make sure that the institution's Authorizing Representative 
signs this form.
    3. Before faxing this form, submit your electronic application via 
the e-APPLICATION system. You will receive an automatic 
acknowledgement, which will include a PR/Award number (an identifying 
number unique to your application).
    4. Place the PR/Award number in the upper right hand corner of ED 
424.
    5. Fax ED 424 to the Application Control Center at (202) 260-1349.
    We may request that you give us original signatures on all other 
forms at a later date.
    You may access the electronic grant application for the PCER 
Program at: http://e-grants.ed.gov.
    Due to software upgrades, it is anticipated that the e-Application 
software will be unavailable for several days in mid-January. The 
tentative dates for this system down time are January 11-21, 2002. 
Please check this site for future updates on system availability.
    We have included additional information about the e-APPLICATION 
pilot project (see Parity Guidelines between Paper and Electronic 
Applications) in the application package.

Electronic Access to This Document

    You may view this document, as well as all other Department of 
Education documents published in the Federal Register, in text or Adobe 
Portable Document Format (PDF) on the Internet at the following site: 
http://www.ed.gov/legislation/FedRegister.
    To use PDF you must have Adobe Acrobat Reader, which is available 
free at this site. If you have questions about using PDF, call the U.S. 
Government Printing Office (GPO), toll free, at 1-888-293-6498; or in 
the Washington, DC area at (202) 512-1530.

    Note: The official version of this document is the document 
published in the Federal Register. Free Internet access to the 
official edition of the Federal Register and the Code of Federal 
Regulations is available on GPO Access at: http://www.access.gpo.gov/nara/index.html.


    Program Authority: 20 U.S.C. 6031.

    Dated: December 13, 2001.
Grover J. Whitehurst,
Assistant Secretary for Educational, Research and Improvement.
[FR Doc. 01-31127 Filed 12-14-01; 8:45 am]
BILLING CODE 4000-01-U