Research Matters

Producing research that serves the field of education and generating scholarship that advances educational knowledge and social science is central to Penn GSE's mission. For us to remain an exciting and intellectually vibrant community of scholarship and ideas, we must continue to discover new knowledge and solutions that advance education in grades K-16. Our work is as diverse as the field of education itself, from studies of early childhood literacy, teacher professional development, mathematical reasoning, and state and federal funding policies, to explorations of children's identity development, youth violence prevention, and how institutions of higher education can be effective partners in civic advancement.

Our Funded Research Portfolio

For a relatively small school of education, our faculty has a remarkable record of getting grant money to support research. Over the last five years, we have secured $40 million in funding for our work. About half has come from the federal government (principally from the U.S. Department of Education, the National Institutes of Health, and the National Science Foundation) and half from a variety of private foundations, state governments, and corporate sponsors that share our interests and passions for education. Grant funding can come in a package as small as a few thousand dollars for a professional development intervention with teachers in the city of Philadelphia, or as large as a multi-million dollar award to establish a cross-disciplinary center for the study of cognition and science instruction.

Find out more

To learn more, you can read our faculty bios or you can explore @Penn GSE, A Review of Research, a semi-annual digest of the scholarly work of our faculty - it's not a comprehensive account of our work, but it's a pretty fair representation of diverse and interesting scholarship that's going on in our school.

You can also contact our communications department here.