The Institute of Education Sciences (IES) is celebrating its 20th anniversary this year. The College of Education is a proud partner of IES—in FY2020, 47 researchers secured $48.8 million in new sponsored research funding and received 89 active research awards. Nationally, UO ranks second among all universities in number of grants and contracts received from IES and first in the number of National Center for Special Education Research (NCSER) grants and contracts.

Gina Biancarosa, Ann Swindells Chair in Education and professor in the department of Special Education and Clinical Sciences shared some reflections on IES’ impact over the last 20 years.

Why is IES’ unique role in education research important to you?

IES funds research that no other funder, private or public, does. It is especially instrumental in forwarding the science of measurement in education. Traditionally, educators and researchers take measures for granted, but developing and validating measures that are sensitive to growth due to instruction is not easy. It is both time and labor intensive. Yet without the support of IES, much of the measurement research conducted in the last 20 years would not have occurred.

As opposed to measures developed specifically for an intervention, the IES measurement research mechanism supports the creation of tests that can serve K-12 education broadly speaking. Moreover, with IES’ commitment to open-source resources, it guarantees that people are able to access new measures for free. This accessibility serves future researchers, and more importantly schools and the students they serve.

Is there an IES project or grant you’ve worked on that’s special to you?  

IES has supported two measurement grants that have enabled the development and validation of a truly innovative measure of reading comprehension that we call MOCCA. MOCCA differs from traditional comprehension assessment in several critical ways.

First, MOCCA does not use multiple choice questions. Instead, it uses a modified maze approach wherein a sentence is removed from a very short story, and the student’s task is not to answer a question, but rather determine which of several sentence choices best completes the story.

Second, MOCCA provides two scores: one related to comprehension skill and one that diagnoses where students are struggling when they are not demonstrating good comprehension. The diagnostic information helps teachers to plan individualized instruction to help students improve their reading comprehension

Finally, in the latest grant, we are making MOCCA computer-adaptive, so that it takes less time away from instruction. The development of this web-based assessment, which is available for free use at http://mocca.uoregon.edu, simply would not have been possible without the vision and support of IES.

How would you describe the impact that IES has on the education sciences in 3 words?  

Evidence-based practices and tools