What this program funds
Spencer's Small Research Grants fund education research projects with budgets up to $50,000, across any discipline, method, or geographic context. "Education research" is read broadly — classrooms, families, informal learning, policy, higher education, workforce learning — but the project must be fundamentally about education, not a general social science study with an education-adjacent sample. Projects can run from roughly one year up to several years, and the program is intentionally field-initiated: there is no thematic call to match.
Eligibility in plain English
- The principal investigator needs an earned doctorate in an academic discipline or professional field, or equivalent experience in an education-research profession.
- Grants are administered through an organization — a university, research institute, or nonprofit — so you'll apply with an institutional affiliation or fiscal sponsor rather than as a private individual.
- International applicants and projects are eligible; the foundation funds work outside the U.S.
- The program does not fund dissertation research — doctoral students should look at dissertation-specific fellowships instead. Confirm current rules with the guidelines.
What you'll need to submit
- Project narrative — held to a strict, short word limit in recent cycles; it must cover aims, background, methods, and significance.
- Budget and budget justification on the foundation's forms.
- CVs or biosketches for the PI and co-PIs.
- Limited appendices where permitted — instruments, protocols, or measures, not extra narrative.
Tips for this mechanism
- Make the education contribution unmistakable. The most common misfire is a solid disciplinary study whose connection to education is incidental. State plainly what the field of education learns.
- Respect the word limit by cutting background, not methods. Reviewers scrutinize methods in proportion to your claims; a thin methods section in a short proposal reads as evasive.
- Budget honestly at the small scale. This mechanism rewards well-scoped studies — pilot work, focused analyses of existing data, small field studies — not compressed versions of million-dollar projects.
- Use the multiple cycles strategically. With several deadlines a year, it is often better to wait a cycle and revise than to submit a rushed draft.
Related programs
- Spencer's larger research grant programs for bigger budgets
- NAEd/Spencer dissertation and postdoctoral fellowships for earlier-career applicants
- Russell Sage Foundation Research Grants for social-science projects beyond education