About Us

Contact Us

The American Educational Research Association (AERA) and the Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR) have joined forces to create a research data hub to connect, educate, and build a community around STEM education data resources. This new platform is supported by the National Science Foundation through its Core Research Program in the Directorate of Education and Human Resources (EHR).

The new Data Resource Hub—Partnership for Expanding Education Research in STEM (PEERS)—is a web-based platform that will include wide-ranging forms of data and data resources and foster new networks of research collaboration and communication in STEM education. AERA and ICPSR will also offer technical assistance and professional development opportunities to expand access to and use of data and support innovative ideas and inquiry. The PEERS project is being led by Principal Investigators Margaret Levenstein (ICPSR) and Felice J. Levine (AERA).

ICPSR

The University of Michigan's ICPSR provides leadership and training in data access, curation, and methods of analysis for the social science research community. ICPSR consists of more than 750 academic institutions and research organizations. It maintains a data archive of more than 250,000 files in social and behavioral sciences including education, voting, criminal justice, aging, health, economics, and more. In 2019, ICPSR was awarded a National Medal for Museum and Library Services, the nation?s highest award recognizing the top 10 museums and libraries that make significant and exceptional contributions to their communities.

Margaret Levenstein, Ph.D.

Margaret C. Levenstein, Ph.D.is Director of ICPSR, the Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research, Research Professor at the Institute for Social Research and the School of Information, and Adjunct Professor of Business Economics at the Ross School of Business at the University of Michigan. She is Co-executive Director of the Michigan Research Data Center, co-chair of the Executive Committee of the FSRDC national network, and Associate Chair of the American Economic Association's Committee on the Status of Women in the Economics Profession.

She is PI of CenHRS, a project enhancing the Health and Retirement Study with linkages to data on HRS employers and co-workers; LinkageLibrary, a repository of linked data and data linkage algorithms; Researcher Passport, a project using open badges for credentialed, trusted researchers to access restricted data; Computational Approaches for the Construction of Novel Macroeconomic Data; and an NSF-funded project conducting experiments to encourage citizen-scientists to improve research metadata.

AERA

AERA is the largest national interdisciplinary scientific association devoted to the study of education and learning, including an important emphasis on STEM. Founded in 1916, AERA aims to advance knowledge about education, encourage scholarly inquiry related to education, and promote the use of research to improve education and serve the public good. With approximately 25,000 members in close to 100 countries, AERA is deeply committed to equity and inclusion in all of its functions and practices. The Association is well-known for the publication of seven major journals (two of which are open access), a valued professional development program, research initiatives that stimulate innovation, a breadth of activities that foster and support sound science policy, a range of public programming, and an annual meeting--the largest gathering of education researchers worldwide. Learn more about becoming a member of AERA!

Felice Levine, Ph.D.

Felice J. Levine, Ph.D. is Executive Director of the American Educational Research Association. Her work focuses on research and science policy issues, research ethics, data sharing, use of big data, the scientific and academic workforce, and higher education. Levine has served in a number of roles relevant to the Hub, including on the National Research Council Committee on Proposed Revisions to the Common Rule for the Protection of Human Subjects in Research in the Behavioral and Social Sciences, the NRC panel on Putting People on the Map: Protecting Confidentiality with Linked Social-Spatial Data, and (as chair of) the NRC workshop on Protecting Student's Records and Facilitating Education Research.

In addition to the PEERS Hub, she is principal investigator of the longstanding AERA-NSF Grants Program and a new NSF collaborative project with the Council of Graduate Schools examining impact and fostering academic support for open science products. Levine is chair of the Board of the Council of Professional Associations on Federal Statistics; a member of the Board of the Consortium of Social Science Associations; a member-at-large of the Social, Political, and Economic Sciences Section of the American Association for the Advancement of Science; and on the Board of Databrary. She also co-chairs the Societies Consortium on Sexual Harassment in STEMM.

Team

ICPSR Co-Principal Investigator Allyson Flaster, Ph.D. | AERA Co-Principal Investigator George L. Wimberly, Ph.D.

ICPSR Project Manager, Katherine Baisden, M.A. | AERA Sr Program Associate Christy Talbot, M.P.P. | AERA Sr Policy Analyst Katherine J. Rosich, M.A.