Researchers in UB Graduate School of Education Awarded Grants Totaling More Than $4.5 Million

BUFFALO, N.Y. -- Education researchers in the University at Buffalo Graduate School of Education (GSE) have received more than $4.5 million dollars in federal grants in recent months.

The largest grant, $2.5 million from the U.S. Department of Education (DOE) was awarded to the Region II Rehabilitation Continuing Education Program (RRCEP) in the GSE's Department of Counseling and Educational Psychology.

Researchers led by David Burganowski will use it to develop education and training programs in human-resources development and organizational development for more than 400 community-based rehabilitation programs (CRPs) across the DOE's Region II, which includes New York, New Jersey, Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands.

CRPs are community-operated organizations that receive no state funding, but provide education, training, housing, respite and job services to physically, mentally and/or developmentally disabled consumers, their families and employers. Locally, such programs include People Inc.

In 1998, the UB program received its first DOE community rehabilitation program grant, also for $2.5 million, to develop and provide a broad range of pertinent job-training programs for CRP staff members in Region II.

Since 1974, the UB RRCEP has conducted DOE-funded, state-of-the-art training for employees of state-run agencies in Region II that offer rehabilitation, occupational-training, employment-coaching and job-placement services to target populations.

The other grants awarded to GSE faculty members are:

o $1 million from the U.S. Department of Education to evaluate a pre-school mathematics curriculum that combines methods developed by Julie A. Sarama, Ph.D., assistant professor, and Douglas H. Clements, Ph.D., professor, both in the Department of Learning and Instruction, and researchers at the University of California at Berkeley. The two teams have received a total of $2.5 million in funding over four years from the DOE for the project.

The curriculum under consideration combines elements of Clements' and Sarama's "Building Blocks Project," developed under a previous $1 million grant from the National Science Foundation, and the "Berkeley Math Readiness Project," a print-based, pre-school mathematics curriculum developed by Berkeley researchers under a DOE grant.

"Building Blocks" employs state-of-the-art software, concrete "manipulatives," and everyday objects in the teaching of math to pre-school children. These materials have been tested in several Buffalo-area schools and found to have a strong, positive effect on mathematics learning in pre-school children.

The UB-Berkeley study is one of seven funded by the DOE Preschool Curriculum Evaluation Research Grants Program (PCER) to evaluate the effectiveness of preschool curricula, and the only one whose overarching goal is to assess and support young children's mathematical development.

o Two-year, $700,000 grant from the Interagency Educational Research Initiative (IERI), to Sarama and Clements, a national figure in the field of childhood mathematical instruction, to scale-up the field research on the Buffalo/Berkeley mathematics curricula to include many more classrooms. IERI represents the National Science Foundation, the U.S. Department of Education and the National Institutes of Health.

Clements said the scaled-up study will assist the applicability of new curricula when used as designed. This is necessary, he explained, because schools will frequently apply only some of the teaching methods and materials suggested or apply the methods differently and experience poorer results than the study predicted. This study, he explained, will permit the researchers to conduct carefully monitored field research in many more schools and classrooms to see if the outcomes support the conclusions drawn from the earlier, smaller study.

o $372,000 grant from the National Science Foundation to Sarama and Clements to develop materials for children and teachers for a comprehensive K-5 mathematics curriculum. The grant is part of a five-year, $5 million NSF grant to multiple centers.

Sarama developed the project in conjunction with the Education Development Center in Newton, Mass. Its purpose is to help America's millions of elementary school teachers learn new ways of teaching math without having to resort to expensive extra-curricular training.

The NSF said that it funded the project to develop a curriculum that is effective for students and can be implemented by teachers without extensive prior special training. That is to say, says Sarama, the curriculum's mathematical content and pedagogical methods will be familiar, even as it provides students and teachers with new things to think about mathematically.