A new professional organization, the Society for Research on Educational Effectiveness (SREE), with its own peer-reviewed journal, is being launched by a Cornell University professor. His purpose is to bring together people who are interested applying the principles of scientific inquiry to examine effectiveness of educational practices, interventions, programs and policies.

Mark Constas, associate professor of education at Cornell, has been awarded $750,000 from the U.S. Department of Education to spearhead the new organization and support the new journal, which is expected to publish its inaugural issue in 2007. The grant is among the largest that a researcher in Cornell's Department of Education has received in more than 10 years. It also the first grant that Cornell has received from the newly formed Institute of Education Sciences, the primary research agency within the Department of Education.

"For more than 85 years, the field of education research has been dominated by the American Educational Research Association," said Constas, a co-principal investigator of the grant with Larry Hedges of Northwestern University and co-chair of SREE's new advisory board.

"The new organization will bring together a growing community of researchers from education as well as psychology, economics and sociology to focus on cause-and-effect relations in education," he said. "The organization will also address ways to better design and conduct investigations to promote the understanding and use of scientific evidence in educational settings."

In the Feb. 1 issue of Education Week, an article reported that creating a society to focus on scientific studies of education is controversial because it implies that only randomized control experiments will be used to study education. "The new organization will address this misconception by including but not limiting our studies to randomized control trials," he said.

SREE will draw members from college and universities, institutions, corporations and organizations that are interested in conducting studies and developing statistical and econometric models that advance the understanding of cause-and-effect relationships to help provide research-based solutions for pressing problems in classrooms, schools, school districts and school systems. "Our intention is that SREE will provide policy-makers, state and local education officials, and the general public with a reliable source of research evidence on which they can base decisions to improve education," he noted.

Constas, whose research focuses on the technical problems and philosophical underpinnings of educational research methodology, joined the Cornell faculty in 2003. He was a program director and educational policy analyst under the Clinton administration in the Office of Educational Research and Improvement. Under the current Bush administration, he served as program director of the Interagency Education Research Initiative -- a program of research initiated by the Office of Science and Technology Policy, Executive Office of the President. He is also a former associate professor at the University of Hong Kong. Constas earned his B.S. degree (1983) from Northeastern University and Ph.D. (1987) in educational psychology and research methodology from Cornell.