NCSER Crowdsourcing Campaign Support

Background
The Institute of Education Sciences (IES) is the independent and non-partisan statistics, research, and evaluation arm of the U.S. Department of Education. Its mission is to provide scientific evidence on which to ground education practice and policy and to share this information in formats that are useful and accessible to educators, parents, policymakers, researchers and the public. Evidence on improving academic achievement is of particular interest to IES. The U.S. is quickly approaching the 50-year anniversary of the first federal legislation to protect the education of students with disabilities (Public Law 94-142). It is long past time to take stock of how well special education is serving the needs of students with disabilities and their families. While we have some information about the challenges faced by these populations, the National Center for Special Education Research (NCSER) at IES seeks support for a crowdsourcing campaign to collect data, at a national level, on the current status of special education in this country.
We seek to more fully understand how individuals with disabilities and their families have experienced special education, and their perspective on the pressing problems facing special education today.

Work Details
The Contractor will provide support to NCSER for a Crowdsourcing Campaign. The Contractor will design and implement a challenge through Challenge.gov for the analysis of the information received through the crowdsourcing campaign using traditional qualitative methods or using more recent advances in machine learning such as natural language processing.
An ancillary goal of this effort will be to raise the profile of almost 20 years of NCSER-funded research.

Period of Performance
The estimated period of performance for this order is from the time of award until September 30th, 2025.