Overview

This grant exists because of the Spencer Foundation's concern about the quality of research work produced by doctoral students in education, which has become most evident to the Foundation through its annual competition for dissertation fellowships.  Students at leading education schools often did not do well in this competition.  The Research Training Grant is an effort to find ways to reinforce the training of educational researchers within these schools.  MSU's version of this program is designed to serve the research education needs of the College's doctoral students in a variety of ways:  1) to pick a group of MSU/Spencer Fellows from among doctoral students who show considerable promise as educational researchers, providing them with a substantial fellowship and intensive mentoring from a senior scholar; 2) to provide grants and equipment in support of research efforts by other doctoral students in a College-wide competition juried by fellow students; 3) to sponsor a number of seminars for students that focus on issues in the practice of educational research and the life of the scholar; and 4) to translate what we learn from this experience into concrete changes in the process of preparing educational researchers in the college as a whole.

Michigan State University's College of Education successfully competed for a Research Training Grant in 1996, and in 2002 we won an extension of the program until 2007.  The program can support a total of about 15 fellows a year.  Fellowship awards are for one year; all recipients can apply for a second year of funding in the spring of their first year in the program.