You're Invited: Submit a Proposal for the SREE Spring 2020 Conference

SREE Spring 2020 Conference
Practical Significance and Meaningful Effects: Learning and Communicating What Matters
A Message from the Program Chairs


Dear Colleague,

We are pleased to invite you to join us for the Spring 2020 Conference of the Society for Research on Educational Effectiveness (SREE), which will be held March 11-14, 2020 in Crystal City, Virginia.

For the second consecutive year, we have two co-chairs for the annual spring conference in order to bring forward both the practitioner perspective (Norma Ming, Supervisor of Research and Evaluation for the San Francisco Unified School District) and the researcher perspective (Jessaca Spybrook, Professor of Evaluation, Measurement, and Research at Western Michigan University). We encourage participants to integrate both perspectives (for example, by co-authoring or co-presenting papers), as they prepare conference submissions.

Our theme for this year’s conference is Practical Significance and Meaningful Effects: Learning and Communicating What Matters. We selected this theme to highlight the importance of moving beyond statistical significance to questions of practical significance, such as: 

  • Under what conditions will this intervention work? For whom?
  • How much impact will it yield?
  • How does this intervention compare to alternatives?
  • What resources are needed to implement, sustain, and scale the intervention?
  • How do I access the information I need to determine if this is the right program for my situation?

In order to evaluate practical significance, opening up the lines of communication on both the research and practitioner sides is critical.

We have some exciting changes for the spring conference we want to highlight as you prepare your submissions:

Changes in Sections & Submissions

  • Education Policy weaves throughout many of the different sections in the spring conference. So this year, rather than having a separate section for policy, we encourage policy submissions across all sections.
  • Teachers and School Leaders is a new section we are introducing this year. This section seeks submissions exploring policies, programs, and practices related to hiring, developing, and retaining teachers and school leaders, as well as studies on measuring teacher and leader effectiveness. 
  • Use of Research Evidence Across Settings is a second new section for the coming year. This section encourages submissions that rigorously examine the practices and conditions influencing how policymakers, practitioners, and other decision-makers utilize research evidence for greater impact, whether in education or in other fields. 
  • We are adding a keyword feature to the submission process so that those submitting proposals can better characterize their work.

New Poster Session

  • One poster session will be specifically dedicated to “work in progress.” We encourage folks to submit research from ongoing studies to communicate implementation challenges and early results and receive useful feedback.

More Affordable Student Rates

  • SREE is lowering both its student membership rate and student conference registration rate for 2020, as well as offering a block of specially-priced rooms for student conference attendees. We hope that this change will make the conference more accessible to the next generation of education researchers!

In the spirit of the conference, we encourage submissions that include both researchers and practitioners and draw attention to the practical significance of their work and how it can inform real-time decisions.

We have assembled an excellent group of Section Chairs:

  • John Papay, Brown University, Teachers and School Leaders
  • Kim Dumont, WT Grant Foundation, Use of Evidence Across Research Settings
  • Ben Kelcey, Cincinnati University, Research Methods
  • Chris Weiland, University of Michigan, Early Childhood
  • Andrea Beesley, SRI International, Academic Learning
  • Shanette Porter, Mindset Scholars Network, Social and Emotional Learning in Educational Settings
  • Becky Unterman, MDRC, Organization of Schools and Systems
  • Fatih Unlu, RAND, Postsecondary Education
  • Sharon Wolf, University of Pennsylvania, Education in Global Contexts

We all look forward to receiving your proposals and then seeing you in March!

Jessaca Spybrook and Norma Ming
SREE Spring 2020 Conference Program Co-Chairs