Impact Update: Spring 2026 grant initiatives
As the academic year draws to a close, our faculty and staff continue their dedicated focus on our mission to advance education, health and well-being and economic vitality.
Several multi-year grant projects are making an impact at both the national and local levels. Here are five of the current projects underway that are changing their fields and people’s lives.
Student belonging shown to decrease chronic absenteeism
Arya Ansari, Associate Professor of Early Childhood Education and Human Development and Family Science, has recently focused on studying the impact of chronic absenteeism among pre-K-12 students and how to prevent it.
As a faculty affiliate with the college’s Crane Center for Early Childhood Research and Policy, he has published refereed journal articles and a summary of the study for researchers and practitioners.
In a recent grant project, he worked with Columbus City Schools to help the system improve students’ absence from school. The urban district has 50,000+ students. He collaborated with colleagues Jay Plasman, Associate Professor of Workforce Development and Education, and Kelly Purtell, Associate Professor of Human Development and Family Science.
Their findings revealed that students with a stronger sense of belonging at the start of the school year were less likely to be absent for both excused and unexcused reasons.
Students who reported greater improvements in school belonging over the year also had fewer unexcused but not excused absences.
$3M HELPERS grant reaches 3,000+ English learners
Principal Investigator Belinda Gimbert, Associate Professor of Educational Administration, and Co-Principal Investigator Dustin Miller, Clinical Assistant Professor of Educational Administration, along with co-PIs Greg Nagy, Applications Developer, and Christina Terrell, Researcher, both with the college's Center on Education and Training for Employment, report that their grant from the Office of English Language Acquisition, U.S. Department of Education has, thanks to its five-year span, reached nearly 3,000 K–8 English learners, alongside hundreds of teachers, families and community members.
The collaborative project, titled Helping English Learners and Partners Excel with Research-based Practices and Support, brought together a network of national partners. It includes public schools in Ohio and Puerto Rico, charter schools in Washington, D.C., Texas, Ohio and Puerto Rico, as well as multiple Texas school districts, community organizations and the University of Puerto Rico Mayagüez. The research-based professional learning for school leaders, pre-service and in-service educators has expanded family and community engagement.
In August, at the end of the grant, an Ohio State Sustainability Team will move forward with the most impactful practices learned.
The Leadership Effect: A $4M Bet on Better Schools
Principal Investigator Roger Goddard, Professor and the Novice G. Fawcett Chair of Educational Administration, and Co-Principal Investigator Minjung Kim, Associate Professor of Quantitative Research, Evaluation and Measurement, are leading one of the most rigorous studies of school leadership improvement currently underway in the United States.
Now preparing for year three, the project, funded by the Institute of Education Services, U.S. Department of Education, evaluates the Balanced Leadership for Student Learning program developed by the McREL Institute. The study also tests whether adding personalized coaching on top of that training produces further gains — an important question for districts weighing how to invest limited resources.
The program brings together principals, assistant principals and teacher leaders as unified school leadership teams from 93 schools in the greater Austin and Houston areas for a full year of intensive professional development delivered through the Region 13 Education Service Center in Texas.
When complete, this work will provide knowledge about the impacts of the school improvement leadership team training and coaching on school leadership, classroom practice, educator turnover and student achievement.
Wallace grant Institute to support 250+ school personnel
Nicole Luthy, PhD, Chief of Staff, and Noelle Arnold, Professor of Educational Administration and Senior Associate Dean, serve as principal investigators on a multiyear grant from the Wallace Foundation in partnership with Columbus City Schools, which has 50,000+ students.
Now in Year 5 of the grant, they will host the annual Leading for Student Success Summer Institute on June 8–9, 2026. The institute provides a dynamic professional development experience for more than 250 Columbus City Schools administrators and operations staff.
Featuring both local and nationally recognized speakers, the institute offers a range of keynote presentations and breakout sessions that focus on effective leadership, change management and the impact of emerging technologies — including artificial intelligence — on education.
Early phonemic awareness: $3.2M study to drive new insights
Shayne Piasta, Professor of Elementary Education specializing in Reading and Literacy in Early and Middle Childhood, as well as faculty affiliate with the college’s Crane Center for Early Childhood Research and Policy, is completing Year 1 of a five-year grant project, Optimizing Early Phonological Awareness Instruction to Support Reading and Spelling Acquisition.
Funded by the National Institutes of Health, she collaborates with researchers at Florida State University. They are conducting two randomized, controlled trials to understand how and when to most effectively teach phonemic awareness to pre-kindergarten and kindergarten children.
In the first year, the researchers have been gathering longitudinal data from 122 children in 13 pre-kindergarten and elementary schools in Ohio, Florida and Georgia. Overall, they expect to work with 720 children in 60 pre-kindergarten and elementary schools.
As evidence of Piasta’s recognized expertise, she was recently one of a select group of international experts invited to present at the sold-out Right to Read Ireland Inaugural Conference.