Written Testimony of Felice J. Levine, PhD Executive Director of the American Educational Research Association Regarding

Noteworthy is (a) the central involvement of EHR in the design and implementation of a 5-year inter-agency plan for federal STEM investment and (b) the joint effort being led by EHR and the Institute of Education Sciences (IES) in the Department of Education to establish standards of evidence for STEM education innovations and research. [...] Department of Education and will be designed to take advantage of the distinctive research capabilities that EHR has developed and the leadership role of the National Science Foundation for the advancement of science and for building cumulative knowledge in education, learning, and science education. [...] The principal goal of this initiative is to fund research that can build a body of rigorous and cumulative knowledge about the STEM learning process in all its forms—across the full range of settings and contexts of learning and the full spectrum of diverse populations, including those traditionally underrepresented in STEM. [...] Building upon the substantive and methodological expertise in our science, the EHR plan includes two longitudinal studies—one to examine the long-term impact of the site experiences within the Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REU) Program on student participation in science and the other to study the impact of Graduate Research Fellowships (GRF) on recipients. [...] To enhance the REESE Program (Research and Evaluation on Education in Science and Education), in 2008, EHR provided support to establish the Center for Advancing Research and Communications in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (ARC) at NORC at the University of Chicago.