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The Florida Center for Reading Research (FCRR) at Florida State University (FSU) has won a $38.6 million contract to help six Southeastern states and their schools put the test results, coursework information, graduation statistics and other education-related data they collect to more effective use in helping students find academic success.
The five-year award, funded through the Institute of Education Sciences at the U.S. Department of Education, makes FCRR the lead for the region in connecting education stakeholders to student data in more meaningful and positive ways.
"Through the award, the Florida Center for Reading Research will help others understand the power of the information available to them and how it can be used to improve their schools, ultimately putting our region on a path to greater student achievement in the years ahead," said FSU president Eric Barron.
The contract will support FCRR and its research partners in operating the Regional Educational Laboratory for the Southeast Region (REL-SE), serving Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Mississippi, North Carolina and South Carolina. Regional laboratories conduct applied research and evaluation, provide technical assistance, develop digital educational materials and other products, and disseminate information in an effort to help others use knowledge from research and practice to improve education.
"Strip away all the acronyms and complex language and you find that this effort is about answering one basic question: How do we use the myriad information we collect to make measureable improvements to our education systems?" said Barbara Foorman, PhD, director and principal investigator for the REL-SE and director of FCRR. "With this contract, we have gained the resources we need to tackle that question and help our local education stakeholders find new success in improving student learning."
FCRR partnered with RMC Research, SEDL and the Instructional Research Group (IRG) to create the winning proposal.
The project will focus on four priorities: improving low-performing schools; scaling up the implementation of more rigorous standards, particularly in mathematics; determining charter school effectiveness and improving their performance; and improving adolescent literacy.
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