Association for Institutional Research
Enhancing Knowledge. Expanding Networks.
Call for Proposals
AIR Research and Dissertation Grants
Deadline: January 16, 2009
With support from the National Science Foundation (NSF), the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) of the Institute of Education Sciences, and the National Postsecondary Education Cooperative (NPEC), the Association for Institutional Research (AIR) operates two grant programs that support research on a wide range of issues of critical importance to U.S. higher education. The program has two separate purposes:
Two levels of grants are supported:NSF and NCES support grants aimed to increase the number of researchers using national datasets and demonstrate the contribution that these datasets make to the national base of knowledge on higher education policy, theory, and practice.
The NPEC funding supports grants that increase the understanding and knowledge of a specific issue area identified by NPEC. This year, the focus will be “Student Flow in Postsecondary Education.”
To qualify for funding, proposal submissions must meet one or more of the following criteria:Research Grants: Faculty and practitioners are eligible for research grants of up to $40,000 for one year of independent research. (Note: These research grants are not available to students). All grant recipients must be affiliated with a U.S. postsecondary institution or relevant nonprofit higher education organization.
Dissertation Grants: Doctoral students are eligible for dissertation grants of up to $20,000 for one year to support dissertation research and writing under the guidance of a faculty dissertation advisor.
Use data from one or more of the national NCES and/or NSF datasets — Research topics may cover a wide range of policy- or practice-related issues. For a list of previously funded topics, see (funded grants). Applicants must include the analysis of data from at least one NSF or NCES dataset in the project. Additional large-scale nationally representative datasets may be used in conjunction with the obligatory NSF or NCES dataset. (For more information, see Appendix A.)
Address the NPEC focus topic of “student flow” — Broadly defined, “student flow” includes movement from high school to various institutional sectors; movement among the various institutional sectors; concurrent enrollments in multiple institutions and student “swirling” among institutions; movement of students with various characteristics; success and graduation rates and time-to-degree analyses for students based on various student flow patterns; and other research on student flow. The analyses can focus on federal, state or regional data and does not require the use of NCES or NSF databases. Nonetheless, the results of the research should have some applicability to the IPEDS data collection efforts. (See Appendix B for more information.)
Proposals may only be submitted electronically. The deadline for proposal submission was January 16, 2009. Applicants will be notified of the funding decisions no later than the first week of April 2009. Funding will be available starting May 1, 2009.
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