Impact Update October 2025 - Grants
Research is central to the Ohio State mission as a public land-grant university. As a Carnegie Research 1 institution, we focus our quest for discovery on improving our world.
This selection of our most recent grants reflects our faculty and staff members’ emphasis on quality education for the young people of our society and on people’s well-being. The grants fall in the categories of elementary and secondary education, higher education administration, career and technical education and consumer sciences.
Arnold and Penn engage rural school students in learning through the arts
Noelle Arnold, Professor of Educational Administration and Senior Associate Dean, with Carlotta Penn, Program Director – Community, both with the college’s Office of Engagement, Discovery and Global Education, have received a Mellon Foundation-sponsored Spark Grant through The Ohio State University for " Schooled on Poetry."
The grant is a collaboration between the college, Ohio State’s College of Arts and Sciences and nationally recognized poet and educator Peter Kahn. The grant will fund work with students in Ohio’s rural school districts, engaging them in activities that develop their voice and involve them with the arts.
Huang grant produces intervention for multilingual language education
Becky Huang, Professor of Elementary Education specializing in language education, has been co-principal investigator on an Institute for Education Sciences, U.S. Department of Education grant Supporting Reading Comprehension for English Learners Through Inquiry-Based, Language-Focused Instruction. She collaborated with Principal Investigator and Professor Dennis Davis at North Carolina State University.
As the grant concluded in July, they co-authored two papers about the intervention’s development and testing: The first is published in the Journal of Educational Research. The second appears in AERA Open.
The intervention’s implementation guide for teachers and lesson plans and material for five sample modules are available at no cost to educators.
$1M grant continues study of pandemic mitigation policies
Dean Lillard, Professor of Consumer Sciences, is principal investigator of a $1 million grant from the National Institutes of Health for a continuing project, The Economic and Social Impact of Pandemic Mitigation Policies: A Cross-country Analysis of Macro Events.
The project studies variations in COVID-mitigation policies across 11 countries. Scholars in each country and the team collectively explore how those policies affected individual social and economic behavior.
More specifically, project collaborators have, are and will be looking at what happened to parental labor supply, mental health, satisfaction with life, fertility and sexual behavior.
Lillard’s latest article from the earlier phase of the grant, “Pandemic Fallout,” appeared in July in the journal Social Indicators Research.
Mayhew advances study of interfaith well-being on college campuses
Matthew Mayhew, Professor of Higher Education and Student Affairs, has had grants from the Templeton Religions Trust and the Arthur Vining Davis Foundations for a project about the interfaith landscape on college campuses.
Now with his latest funding from the Pew Charitable Trusts, from January 2025 through December 2026, Mayhew and his team are extending the current INSPIRES Index to include the following deliverables:
- scorecard and recommendation reports for individual institutions
- an updated website with a reprogrammed campus search tool
- op-eds for various media outlets
- national reports
- conference presentations
The team is inviting 75 additional institutions to participate. They also will update information for the 295 existing institutions to broaden the project’s reach.
College center continues state’s standardized assessment system with $3.1M
Bridget McHugh, Program Director of Education Assessment, and Sean Hickey, Assessment Deputy Director, both with the college’s Center on Education and Training for Employment, received a renewal grant to continue the Ohio Department of Education and Workforce’s FY2026-2027 Technical Testing Project.
They design, update and deliver Ohio’s standardized assessment system for secondary career-technical education programs across 16 career fields. The exams are aligned to Ohio’s specific business and industry needs.
McHugh and Hickey work with the Ohio Department of Education and Workforce’s Office of Career-Technical Education, the Ohio Department of Higher Education, as well as instructors of career and technical education to keep the system up to date.
The tests are delivered via WebXam, a proprietary, online, test-delivery platform developed and maintained by the center.
Professor studies impact of high school students’ career and technical education
Jay Plasman, Associate Professor of Workforce Development and Education, is co-principal investigator of a five-year, Institute for Education Studies grant titled Career Development Opportunities for High School Students in Baltimore City Schools. In the first project of this grant, the team explored and identified all the career development opportunities available to high school students in Baltimore City.
Now in the second project, the team is working with the broader Career and Technical Education Network to identify one career development opportunity on which to focus a more in-depth impact study. This research will provide evidence for policymakers and practitioners to better support high school students’ access to such opportunities.
Plasman’s role is leading the cost analysis portion of the project. He and his team will focus on understanding overall costs of running a statewide technical assessment program and the cost effectiveness of such programs.