(CLOSED) William T. Grant Scholars Program

Sponsor Name: 
William T. Grant Scholars Program
Amount: 
$350,000.00
Description of the Award: 

The William T. Grant Scholars Program supports career development for promising early-career researchers. The program funds five-year research and mentoring plans that significantly expand junior researchers’ expertise in new disciplines, methods, and content areas.

Applicants should have a track record of conducting high-quality research and an interest in pursuing a significant shift in their trajectories as researchers. The Foundation recognizes that early-career researchers are rarely given incentives or support to take measured risks in their work, so this award includes a mentoring component,as well as a supportive academic community.

Awards are based on applicants’ potential to become influential researchers, as well as their plans to expand their expertise in new and significant ways. The application should make a cohesive argument for how the applicant will expand his or her expertise. The research plan should evolve in conjunction with the development of new expertise, and the mentoring plan should describe how the proposed mentors will support applicants in acquiring that expertise. Proposed research plans must address questions that are relevant to policy and practice in the Foundation’s focus areas.

Focus Areas

The Foundation’s mission is to support research to improve the lives of young people ages 5-25 in the United States. We pursue this mission by supporting research within two focus areas. Researchers interested in applying for a William T. Grant Scholars Award must select one focus area:

Reducing Inequality
In this focus area, the program supports research to build, test, and increase understanding of approaches to reducing inequality in youth outcomes, especially on the basis of race, ethnicity, economic standing, language minority status, or immigrant origins. Also, interest in research on programs, policies, and practices to reduce inequality in academic, social, behavioral, and economic outcomes.

Improving the Use of Research Evidence
In this focus area, the program supports research to identify, build, and test strategies to ensure that research evidence is used in ways that benefit youth. Particular interest in research on improving the use of research evidence by state and local decision makers, mid-level managers, and intermediaries.

Reducing Inequality Focus Area

To propose research on reducing inequality, applicants should:

• Identify a specific inequality in youth outcomes, and show that the outcomes are currently unequal. The Scholars Program is especially interested in supporting research to reduce inequality in academic, social, behavioral, or economic outcomes.

• Clearly identify the basis on which these outcomes are unequal, and articulate its importance. The Scholars Program is especially interested in research to reduce inequality on the basis of race, ethnicity, economic standing, language minority status, or immigrant origin status. Proposals for research on reducing inequality on a basis not listed here, or on ways in which a basis of inequality intersects with another, must make a compelling case that this research will improve youth outcomes.

• Articulate how findings from your research will help build, test, or increase understanding of a specific program, policy, or practice to reduce the specific inequality that you have identified. In sum, proposals for research on reducing inequality should make a compelling case that the inequality exists, why the inequality exists, and why the study’s findings will be crucial to informing a policy, program, or practice to reduce it.

Tackling a problem as large as inequality will require fresh, innovative ideas, and they welcome creative studies that have potential to advance or even transform the field.

Improving Research Evidence Focus Area

Proposed research in this focus area must pursue one of the following lines of inquiry:

• Identify or test strategies to improve the use of existing research.

This work may investigate strategies, mechanisms, or conditions for improving research use. Alternatively, studies may measure the effects of deliberate efforts to improve routine and beneficial uses of research in deliberations and decisions that affect young people. For example, prior work suggests that decision makers often lack the institutional resources and requisite skills to seek out and apply research, and certain organizational norms and routines can help overcome those barriers ((Honig, Venkateswaran, & Twitchell, 2014; Mosley & Courtney, 2012; Nicholson, 2014). Future projects might study efforts to alter conditions in the decision making environment. For example, studies might compare the effectiveness of different ways (e.g., technical assistance, research-practice partnerships, cross-agency teams, etc.) to connect existing research with decision makers or exploit natural variation across decision making environments to identify the conditions that improve research use.

• Identify or test strategies for producing more useful research evidence.

This includes examining ways to create incentives, structures, or relationships that facilitate the production of research that responds to decision makers’ needs. Applicants might identify strategies for altering the incentive structures or organizational cultures of research institutions so that researchers conduct more practice or policy relevant studies and are rewarded for research products that are considered useful by decision makers. Other applicants might identify the relationships and organizational structures that lead to the prioritization of decision makers’ research needs.

• Studies may also examine ways to optimize researchers’, decision makers’, and intermediaries’ joint work to benefit youth.

For example, one might investigate the effectiveness of funders’ efforts to incentivize joint work between researchers and decision makers. Other projects might develop and test effective curriculum and training experiences that develop researchers’ capacity to conduct collaborative work with practitioners.

• Test the assumption that using high-quality research improves decision making and youth outcomes.

This is a long-standing implicit assumption, but the case for using research would be more compelling if there were a body of evidence showing that using research benefits youth. WT Grant Foundation wants to know the conditions under which using research evidence improves decision making and youth outcomes. We suspect that simply using research will not be sufficient to yield positive outcomes. The relationship between the use of research evidence and youth outcomes will be affected by a number of conditions. One hypothesis is that the quality of the research and the quality of the decision making will work synergistically to yield strong outcomes for youth.

 

The research design should provide credible evidence to support or refute hypotheses about the strategies that improve use of research. For example, a randomized controlled trial might test whether an intervention that provides schools with technical assistance and coaching on the use of research evidence is more likely to lead to adoption of evidence-based programs. Observational studies that leverage state variation to examine whether states that use research when making decisions improve youth outcomes are also welcomed.

Where appropriate, applicants should consider using existing methods, measures, and analytic tools so that findings can be compared and aggregated across studies. That said, existing measures may not be well-suited for some inquiries, and thus we welcome studies that adapt existing measures or develop new ones that can be employed in future studies. Finally, we continue to promote the use of mixed methods wherein multiple types of data are collected and integrated.

Applicants proposing projects on the use of research evidence to review the resources provided on our website, including writing by staff, grantees, and others in the field are encouraged.

Studying ways to improve the use of research evidence will require new and innovative ideas, and welcome creative studies that have potential to advance the field are recognized.

Applicants are encouraged to identify other conditions under which using research evidence improves youth outcomes. For example, recent federal policies have instituted mandates and incentives to increase the adoption of programs with evidence of effectiveness from randomized controlled trials.Did these policies actually increase the use of those programs and improve child and youth outcomes?

Applicants Eligibility:

Applicants must have received their terminal degree within seven years of submitting their application. We calculate this by adding seven years to the date the doctoral degree was conferred. In medicine, the seven-year maximum is dated from the completion of the first residency.

Applicants must be in a tenure-track position.

Applicants of any discipline are eligible.

Limit (Number of applicants permitted per institution): 
1
Sponsor Final Deadline: 
Jul 02, 2019
OSVPR Application or NOI Instructions: 

The Penn State downselect will be in 2 stages:

Stage 1: All applicants should submit their applications through the psu.infoready4.com website by the 5/20/19 deadline.

Stage 2: One applicant may be nominated from each college/campus. Therefore, the Limited Submission Office will then distribute the applications to the pertinent Research Deans. Each college/campus is responsible to select their nominee.

Please review the full application guidelines carefully using the URL Link above before applying.

Internal Nomination Process:

Please upload one PDF file (File name: Last name_GrantScholars_2019) containing the following items in order no later than 4:00 p.m. on the internal submission deadline:

1). A 5-year research plan (2 pages max) which should include:

  • the unique contribution of the research,
  • its significance in terms of policy and/or practice,
  • research design and methodology,
  • data sources and collection procedures.

2). A mentoring plan (1 page max):

  • applicant’s current areas of expertise and the new ones that will be added during the award;
  • the rationale for the proposed mentor(s);
  • the mentoring activities designed to develop the new expertise;
  • how the award will add significant value to the proposed mentoring relationship.

3). Brief CV (2 pages max).

Questions concerning the limited submissions process may be submitted to limitedsubs@psu.edu.

To be considered as a Penn State institutional nominee, please submit a notice of intent by the date provided directly below.
This limited submission is in downselect: 
Penn State may only submit a specific number of proposals to this funding opportunity. The number of NOIs received require that an internal competition take place, thus, a downselect process has commenced. No Penn State researchers may apply to this opportunity outside of this downselect process. To apply for this limited submission, please use this link:
OSVPR Downselect Deadline: 
Monday, May 20, 2019 - 4:00pm
Notes: 
Glodowski, Kathryn (Harrisburg, Behavioral Sci & Edu/Soc. Sci & Psychology) and Harrell-Levy, Marinda (Brandywine, Human Dev. & Family Studies) 5/21/19