Program for North American Mobility in Higher Education

The Program for North American Mobility is designed to assist colleges and universities in the United States, Canada, and Mexico in giving students a North American perspective on education and training in a wide range of subject areas. The ultimate intent of the program is to assist with the building of a North American community. The North American Program fosters student exchange within the context of multilateral curricular development. Students benefit from having an added "North American" curriculum perspective and cultural dimension to their studies through a combination of trilateral curricular innovation and study abroad. The program will support collaborative efforts in the form of consortial partnerships consisting of either 1) at least two academic institutions from each country, funded for a period of four years, or 2) a partnership consisting of one academic institution from each country for a period of three years.

Amount: $180,000

Date due: May 17, 2011

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Digging into Data

The creation of vast quantities of Internet-accessible digital data and the development of techniques for large-scale data analysis have led to remarkable new discoveries in genetics, astronomy, and other fields, and—importantly—connections between different academic disciplines. The Digging into Data Challenge seeks to discover how these new research techniques might also be applied to questions in the humanities and social sciences. New techniques of large-scale data analysis allow researchers to discover relationships, detect discrepancies, and perform computations on so-called “big data” sets that are so large that they can be processed only by using computing resources and computational methods that were developed and made economically affordable within the past few years. This “data deluge” has arisen not just from the capture and storage of data on everyday transactions such as Internet searches, consumer purchases, cell phone records, “smart” metering systems and sensors, but also from the digitization of all types of media, with books, newspapers, journals, films, artworks, and sound recordings being digitized on a massive scale. It is possible to apply data linkage and analysis techniques to large and diverse data collections, including survey data, economic data, digitized newspapers, books, music, and other scholarly and scientific resources. How might these techniques help researchers use these materials to ask new questions about and gain new insights into our world? To encourage innovative approaches to this question, eight international research organizations are organizing a joint grant competition to focus the attention of the social sciences, humanities, library, archival, and information sciences communities on large-scale data analysis and its potential applications. The four goals of the initiative are * to promote the development and deployment of innovative research techniques in large-scale data analysis that focus on applications for the humanities and social sciences; * to foster interdisciplinary collaboration among researchers in the humanities, social sciences, computer sciences, library, archive, information sciences, and other fields, around questions of text and data analysis; * to promote international collaboration among both researchers and funders; and * to ensure efficient access to and sharing of the materials for research by working with data repositories that hold large digital collections.

Amount: $175,000

Date due: June 16, 2011

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AERA Research Grants Program

AERA Research Grants Program provides small grants and training for researchers who conduct studies of education policy and practice using quantitative methods, including the analysis of data from the large-scale data sets sponsored by National Center for Education Statistics and NSF.

Research Grants are available for faculty at institutions of higher education, postdoctoral researchers, and other doctoral-level scholars. Applications are encouraged from a variety of disciplines, including but not limited to education, sociology, economics, psychology, demography, statistics, and psychometrics.

Amount: $35,000

Date due: March 9, 2011

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Financial Education grants (broad scope)

The National Endowment for Financial Education, a nonprofit, national foundation wholly dedicated to improving the financial well-being of all Americans, has announced guidelines for its 2011 grant program.

The NEFE grants program seeks to fund innovative research and research-based development projects that can make a profound contribution to the field of financial literacy. Inquiries are encouraged from disciplines in fields as diverse as behavior, economics, neuroscience, sociology, psychology, marketing, finance, education, change theory, decision sciences, and others.

Of particular interest are pro-active research projects whose findings may cultivate critical thinking in the financial literacy community. Also of interest are development projects that put research recommendations into action. Project outcomes must be capable of achieving traction and measurable impact with audiences such as financial education intermediaries, researchers, practitioners, decision makers, and others who can achieve effective outreach to a target population with an unmet financial literacy need or to the general public.

Amount: Varies

Date due: June 7, 2011

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Economics of Retirement

This Funding Opportunity Announcement (FOA) encourages research on the economic and health-related factors that influence older persons’ choices on labor force participation as they near typical retirement age and throughout the later stages of life. The interaction of health, work, family status, and economic wellbeing is enormously complex, and the direction of causal effects among those factors is often unclear. Because of those complexities, the FOA especially encourages innovative approaches to (1) modeling the dynamic processes underlying labor force decisions over the life-cycle, and (2) enabling valid causal inference regarding the effects of economic and health factors on work decisions as well as the effects of work on health status. The FOA calls for analysis of secondary datasets, development of new datasets, observational and experimental analysis, cross-national comparisons; and quasi-experiments enabled by changes in public policy. Research that identifies disparities between population segments or emphasizes at-risk groups is encouraged.

Date due: May 16, 2011 (Letter of intent); June 16, 2011 (Application)

Amount: $50,000

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