NSF aims to maintain a balanced portfolio across the Key Program Functions through which the Foundation carries out its work, and to sustain the share of the NSF investment that is devoted to education and training. Investments are made through distinct activities committed to the development of human resources for science, mathematics, engineering, and technology, and citizens with skills in these areas needed in the information age.

Merit Review

Awards for education and training projects are made on a competitive basis. Within this competitive atmosphere, NSF relies heavily on merit review by peer evaluation to select which proposals to fund. Awards for large and complex programs often involve additional levels of review, including site visits and review panels. Consistently, the merit review system has succeeded in generating high quality reviews which equip NSF to make well-informed proposal decisions. Within the education and training key program function, emphasis is placed on the impact of proposed projects on the science and engineering infrastructure in such areas as increasing participation of women, minorities, and persons with physical disabilities; and the distribution of resources with respect to institutions and geographic areas.

Out of the total of approximately 30,000 proposals received each year by NSF in recent years, between 4,000 and 5,500 have been for education and training projects. The funding rate is the number of competitive awards made during a year as a percentage of total proposals competitively reviewed. Funding rates have fluctuated slightly during the last 6 years. (There are several reasons for the decline in the number of proposals submitted in FY 1996, including the planned phase-out of some programs and a greater use of pre-proposals, which reduces the number of full proposals submitted.)

NSF has always encouraged the increased participation of special groups of investigators in the science, mathematics, engineering and technology (SMET) education enterprise: new principal investigators (PIs) (those who did not have an NSF award in the 5-year period preceding the proposal), female investigators, and minority investigators. Diversity is crucial to making the national SMET education infrastructure healthy and whole.

New principal investigators are important to the nation because they include future leaders in SMET education in the United States. Bringing top notch young scientists, engineers, and educators into the system ensures excellence and quality for the next generation of science education projects. While new PIs naturally have lower than average funding rates due to their inexperience, approximately 53 percent of competitive education and training awards go to new investigators. NSF's goal is to ensure that a cadre of outstanding new educators is indeed always arriving on the national R&D scene, and being funded.

The number of new investigators submitting proposals for education and training projects is lower now than five years ago, and the number of prior investigators is higher. These changes reflect the growth pattern of the whole education and training portfolio. Funds for NSF's education and training function grew rapidly in the late 1980s, and funding actions at that time produced a cohort of experienced investigators to compete for funds in the 1990s. There is a smaller discrepancy in the funding rates of new and former investigators in Education and Training than in Research Project Support. This suggests that education and training projects are conducted by a wider range of investigators (proportionally), with fewer grantees receiving continuing support than in research projects.

New investigators, including female and minority investigators, bring different perspectives that ensure the health of science education in the nation, now and in the future. The funding rates for both females and minorities in education and training projects compare favorably with the funding rate for all PIs in this function for FY 1996. An on-going goal is to maintain these increased funding rates, while also increasing the total number of females and minorities submitting proposals.

Education and Training Partnerships

NSF is increasing its emphasis on partnerships with academic institutions, focusing on treating whole systems as the most effective way to make improvements in science and mathematics education. Together, academe and NSF are developing new approaches to education activities, involving in the process state and local governments, the private sector, other agencies, and others with a stake in the science, mathematics, engineering, and technology education enterprise. Examples include expanded activities in the Urban Systemic Initiatives and undergraduate education reform efforts. Within NSF, partnership activities in the education and training function include the NSF-wide Integrative Graduate Education and Research Training grants experiment for interdisciplinary training of graduate students in unique research settings.

Program Evaluation

The Education and Human Resources Activity has been developing and implementing an intensive program evaluation and assessment of its programs in a five-year cycle. Results-oriented management has resulted in increased feedback and use of performance information in the effective management of programs. By determining the extent to which our various programs have reached their stated goals, by assessing the quality of the accomplishments of those programs, and by making readily available the best products of those programs, NSF has developed better capabilities to inform and assist science and engineering researchers and educators across the U.S. Within NSF, such evaluations have served as guide for the planning of future programs as well as revisions to existing ones.

To carry out its evaluation work, NSF focused on developing three kinds of studies: evaluations, which are systematic examinations conducted by external evaluators to determine the merit or worth of programs and ways in which they can be improved; impact studies, which are briefer examinations of programmatic effectiveness that yield more limited reports; and monitoring of programs, which involves ongoing collection and analysis of data on the status of selected projects. Since 1992, over 75 percent of the education and human resources programs either have been evaluated, have evaluations in progress, or are in the planning stage. Two examples of recent evaluations are given below:

• The evaluation of the Statewide Systemic Initiatives (SSI) program, conducted by an external contractor, documented educational changes at each stage of the systemic reform process: project activities, in-state-level collaboration, state policy and practice, local and higher education delivery and policy systems, and student experience and outcomes. This evaluation has provided NSF and its partners an indication of the progress in education reform in selected states. NSF has also used on-going project monitoring and internal project management, including a critical mid-point review for each of the states, to assess the performance of each state. These assessments revealed that many of the states needed increased focus on equity issues, scaling up, sustainability, and further development and implementation of standards-based science and mathematics instructional programs. Public and private partnerships formed since the NSF awards were made have contributed to the success of several states, according to these evaluations. The most successful states built the systemic infrastructure required for educational reform.

• An external study of former students from Engineering Research Centers found that over 80 percent of supervisors judged the job performance for former ERC students, regardless of their sector of employment, to be superior to peers in a variety of dimensions. These dimensions included overall ability to perform their jobs, depth and breadth of technical understanding, and ability to work in interdisciplinary teams. The ERC program exemplifies the overlap between key program functions. For budget purposes, ERCs are classified with Research Project Support, but the centers program has always considered its educational component to be important.

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