Department of Education, Institute of Education Sciences, Social Character Development Research Program National Evaluation

The U.S. Department of Education intends to issue a six-month, no-cost extension to existing contract # ED-01-CO-0039, Task Order # 0006. The current period of performance ends on August 28, 2008. The purpose of the extension is to enable members of the Mathematica Policy Research team to assist the Institute of Education Sciences (IES) with completing the National Evaluation Report (NER). On September 15, 2003 the Institute of Education Sciences (IES) of the U.S. Department of Education (ED) awarded contract ED-01-CO- 0039/0006 to Mathematica Policy Research (MPR) of Princeton, New Jersey, to be the national evaluation contractor for the SACD research program. The purpose of SACD is to determine the impact of seven social and character development-oriented programs on grade school students’ socio-emotional and educational development. The primary charge for MPR is to collect data at 84 schools over a three-year period (and 12 additional schools over a 2-year period), and to analyze the data to determine the impact of the programs. Utilizing MPR's technical reports, IES is presently authoring the National Evaluation Report (NER), which will present the study findings. The NER will be released to the public after peer review and final approval by the Standards and Review office within IES. During the six-month period (August 28, 2008 – February 28, 2009), the 10-member MPR research team will support IES (at no additional cost beyond the amount in the current contract budget) with writing and finalizing the NER. The successful completion of the NER will depend heavily on the experiences of the MPR team, which has performed work on the SACD project for the nearly the past 5 years. MPR is uniquely qualified to perform this work because of the following competencies, experiences, and skills: Access to SACD data that was collected; Familiarity and extensive experience conducting analyses using the SACD data; Proven record of providing technical reports detailing the methods used and the findings from this research; Proven record of answering technical questions; Demonstrated ability to assist in addressing questions about the methods and findings from this research. This notice is for informational purposes only. A request for proposal is not available. Interested parties may, however, request further information no later than July 22, 2008, by email to Contract Specialist John Machen at [email protected].