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GSE gets $4.5 million in grants

Published: November 21, 2002

By PATRICIA DONOVAN
Contributing Editor

Education researchers in the 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.

The other grants awarded to GSE faculty members are:

  • $1 million from the U.S. Department of Education to evaluate a pre-school mathematics curriculum that combines methods developed by Julie A. Sarama, assistant professor, and Douglas H. Clements, 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 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.

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.

  • Two-year, $700,000 grant from the Interagency Educational Research Initiative (IERI) to Sarama and Clements to scale up the field research on the Buffalo/Berkeley mathematics curricula to include more classrooms.

Clements said the scaled-up study will assist the applicability of new curricula when used as designed. This is necessary, he explained, because schools frequently will 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.

  • $372,000 grant from the NSF 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 extracurricular training.