[Federal Register Volume 84, Number 60 (Thursday, March 28, 2019)]
[Notices]
[Pages 11755-11757]
From the Federal Register Online via the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]
[FR Doc No: 2019-05970]


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DEPARTMENT OF EDUCATION

[Docket ID Number ED-2019-IES-0017]


Proposed Priorities for the Institute of Education Sciences and 
Request for Comment

AGENCY: Institute of Education Sciences, U.S. Department of Education.

ACTION: Notice.

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SUMMARY: The Director of the Institute of Education Sciences (IES) 
proposes priorities to guide IES' work and provides a 60-day period for 
members of the public to review and comment on them. When the Director 
submits the priorities to the National Board for Education Sciences 
(the Board) for its

[[Page 11756]]

approval, all comments received in response to this notice will be 
provided as well.

DATES: We must receive your comments on or before May 28, 2019.

ADDRESSES: Submit your comments through the Federal eRulemaking Portal 
or via postal mail, commercial delivery, or hand delivery. We will not 
accept comments submitted by fax or by email or those submitted after 
the comment period. To ensure that we do not receive duplicate copies, 
please submit your comments only once. In addition, please include the 
Docket ID at the top of your comments.
     Federal eRulemaking Portal: Go to www.regulations.gov to 
submit your comments electronically. Information on using 
Regulations.gov, including instructions for accessing agency documents, 
submitting comments, and viewing the docket, is available on the site 
under ``Help.''
     Postal Mail, Commercial Delivery, or Hand Delivery: The 
Department strongly encourages commenters to submit their comments 
electronically. However, if you mail or deliver your comments about the 
proposed priorities, address them to Dr. Mark Schneider, Director, 
Institute of Education Sciences, U.S. Department of Education, 400 
Maryland Ave SW, Room 4109, Potomac Center Plaza, Washington, DC 20202.

    Privacy Note:  The Department's policy is to make comments 
received from members of the public available for public viewing on 
the Federal eRulemaking Portal at www.regulations.gov. Therefore, 
commenters should be careful to include in their comments only 
information that they wish to make publicly available.


FOR FURTHER INFORMATION CONTACT: Teresa Cahalan at (202) 245-7299 or by 
email at: [email protected].
    If you use a telecommunications device for the deaf (TDD) or a text 
telephone (TTY), call the Federal Relay Service (FRS), toll free, at 1-
800-877-8339.

SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION:
    Invitation to Comment: We invite you to submit comments regarding 
the proposed priorities. To ensure that your input has maximum effect, 
we urge you to identify clearly the portion of the proposed priorities 
that your comment addresses.
    During and after the comment period, you may inspect all public 
comments about this notice in 550 12th St SW, Room 4126, Washington, 
DC, between the hours of 8:30 a.m. and 4:00 p.m., Eastern Time, Monday 
through Friday of each week except Federal holidays.
    Assistance to Individuals with Disabilities in Reviewing the 
Comments: On request, we will supply an appropriate accommodation or 
auxiliary aid to an individual with a disability who needs assistance 
to review the comments or other documents related to this notice. If 
you want to schedule an appointment for this type of accommodation or 
auxiliary aid, please contact the person listed under FOR FURTHER 
INFORMATION CONTACT.

    Program Authority:  Education Sciences Reform Act of 2002 (20 
U.S.C. 9515)

Proposed Priorities for the Institute of Education Sciences

    Background: The Education Sciences Reform Act of 2002 (20 U.S.C. 
9515) requires the Director of IES to propose to the Board priorities 
for IES--that is, topics that require long-term research and are 
focused on understanding and solving education problems and issues. 
Such topics may include those associated with the goals and 
requirements of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965, as 
amended, the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, as amended, 
and the Higher Education Act of 1965, as amended, such as closing the 
achievement gap; ensuring that all children have the ability to obtain 
a high-quality education and reach, at a minimum, proficiency on State 
standards and assessments; and ensuring access to, and opportunities 
for, postsecondary education.
    Before submitting proposed priorities to the Board, the Director 
must make the priorities available to the public for comment for not 
less than 60 days and provide each comment submitted to the Board. The 
Board must approve or disapprove the priorities for IES proposed by the 
Director, including any necessary revision of the priorities. Once 
approved, the Board will transmit the priorities to the appropriate 
congressional committees.

Mission

    By its authorizing legislation, IES is charged with supporting 
research, conducting evaluations, and gathering statistics to improve 
the academic achievement and the access to high-quality education of 
all learners from early childhood to adulthood. As an applied science 
agency, IES seeks to translate its work into useful and usable 
information that can be accessed by a wide range of stakeholders.

Overview

     In pursuit of its goals, IES supports research, conducts 
evaluations, and gathers statistics that conform to rigorous scientific 
standards.
     To ensure education programs and policies are evidence 
based, IES disseminates and promotes the use of research in ways that 
are objective, unbiased, and accessible.
     By furthering the transformation of education into an 
evidence-based field, IES enables the Nation to educate learners across 
the lifespan cost effectively.

Goals

     To gather educational statistics that provide information 
on schools, teachers, and learners across the Nation and serve as a 
foundation for education science research.
     To develop and identify programs, practices, and policies 
that enhance learner achievement and that can be widely deployed.
     To better measure and understand the variation in the 
effectiveness of education programs, practices, and policies.
     To help identify the activities that best fit with schools 
and learners characterized by different economic and social attributes 
and different learning needs.
     To better measure the cost and cost-effectiveness of 
education interventions;
     To disseminate the results of scientifically valid 
research, statistics, and evaluations in ways that are accessible, 
understandable, and usable in the improvement of educational practice 
by teachers and other educators, parents and families, learners, 
administrators, researchers, policymakers, and the public.

Standards for Excellence in Education Research

    To increase the quality and usefulness of education research, IES 
promotes, encourages, and supports the use of the Standards for 
Excellence in Education Research (SEER), which is available at https://ies.ed.gov/seer.asp. Under SEER, as appropriate for a particular 
research program, researchers:
     Preregister their studies.
     Make their data and methods openly available.
     Identify the core components of interventions.
     Document implementation.
     Focus on meaningful outcomes.
     Analyze costs and calculate the cost-effectiveness of 
interventions.
     Have a strategy for scaling up.
    In furtherance of these goals, IES has the following specific 
priorities:

A Focus on Outcomes

     At infancy, toddler, and preschool levels, key measures 
include:

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    [cir] Readiness for schooling; and
    [cir] Developmental outcomes for infants and toddlers with or at 
risk for disabilities.
     At kindergarten through 12th grade, key measures include:
    [cir] Higher achievement in reading, writing, science, technology, 
engineering, and math;
    [cir] Improvement in other indicators of achievement besides 
student performance on assessments, such as annual student attendance 
and retention rates and, where applicable and available, student 
academic growth, high school graduation rates, and postsecondary 
enrollment and persistence rates.
    [cir] Improvement in non-academic outcomes such as, but not limited 
to, parent satisfaction, school climate, student mental health, and 
civic engagement.
    [cir] Improved teaching and learning;
    [cir] Improved behaviors and social skills that support learning in 
school and successful transitions; and
    [cir] Functional outcomes that improve success in school and 
transitions to employment, independent living, and postsecondary 
education for students with disabilities.
     At the postsecondary level, key measures include:
    [cir] Enrollment in, and completion of, programs that prepare 
learners for successful careers and lives;
    [cir] Family sustaining wages post-completion;
    [cir] Improved teaching and learning; and
    [cir] Acquisition of skills by adults.

Increasing Dissemination and Use

     Increase outreach to teachers and other educators, parents 
and families, learners, administrators, researchers, policymakers, and 
the public using both traditional and new media.
     Enhance the experience of What Works Clearinghouse users, 
adding features that make its reviews more useful and usable.
     Increase the number of What Works Clearinghouse Practice 
Guides and Intervention Reports, ensuring that they are written in an 
accessible manner and supported by material that increases the use of 
this information.
     Develop and refine education research methods including 
new methods that take advantage of large administrative data sets and 
increased computing power.
     Expand the use of research using longitudinal data sets.
     Invest in postsecondary programs that develop a pipeline 
of talented education researchers, especially programs that include 
apprenticeships in education agencies.
     Encourage partnerships between researchers and private 
companies, both non-profit and for-profit, to put interventions that 
work into more schools and in the hands of more teachers, parents and 
families, and learners.
    Accessible Format: Individuals with disabilities can obtain this 
document in an accessible format (e.g., braille, large print, 
audiotape, or compact disc) on request to the person listed under FOR 
FURTHER INFORMATION CONTACT.
    Electronic Access to This Document: The official version of this 
document is the document published in the Federal Register. You may 
access the official edition of the Federal Register and the Code of 
Federal Regulations at www.govinfo.gov. At this site you can view this 
document, as well as all other documents of this Department published 
in the Federal Register, in text or Portable Document Format (PDF). To 
use PDF you must have Adobe Acrobat Reader, which is available free at 
the site.
    You may also access documents of the Department published in the 
Federal Register by using the article search feature at 
www.federalregister.gov. Specifically, through the advanced search 
feature at this site, you can limit your search to documents published 
by the Department.

Mark Schneider,
Director, Institute of Education Sciences.
[FR Doc. 2019-05970 Filed 3-27-19; 8:45 am]
BILLING CODE 4000-01-P