Subject: SIG IT: Wrap up of AERA 2009

Dear SIG-IT members,

I hope that everyone who attended the 2009 AERA meeting had a great time. I was impressed with the quality of sessions ­ particularly the SIG-IT papers, roundtables, and posters!

If you haven¹t heard, however, AERA has decided to implement some significant changes in order to foster high quality presentations and sessions at future annual meetings. These changes will take effect for the AERA 2010 meeting. I would like to disseminate and highlight some of the changes that immediately impact our members.

1. The deadline for AERA 2010 proposal submissions has been advanced to JULY 15, 2009. The proposal submission system will be open on June 1 and closed on July 15, 2009. Please plan ahead to prepare your proposal submissions to SIG-IT or other units of AERA. Also, the length of proposals has been increased.

2. The number of paper and symposium sessions will be reduced to about 1,000 total (from 1,400 previously). The lost sessions will be substituted with increased numbers of roundtable sessions and poster sessions.

3. AERA is in the process of promoting the status of roundtable and poster sessions by implementing a new format for the sessions. The new format will be working group roundtable and structured poster sessions.

4. All paper, symposium, roundtable, and poster session submissions will require a full paper uploaded to the submission system at least three weeks prior to the beginning of the Annual meeting. This isn¹t much of a change, but I hear that they are going to more strongly enforce this.

5. The peer review process will be changed to a form of review panel that consists of a group of experts in the area. Graduate student reviewers may participate in the review panel; however, the rating scores made by graduate student reviewers will not be calculated into the final rating scores. I see this as a major issue, and will bring this up next year. However, for this year we will have to go with this new way of reviewing proposals.

7. AERA is no longer accepting 2 year membership subscriptions. Please make sure you also renew your SIG-IT membership every year.

The details of these changes are in the March issue of Educational Researcher (Vol. 38, No. 2, pp. 153-155).

The method of determining the number of sessions each SIG gets remains the same, so make sure you send your proposals to SIG-IT and renew your membership so we have lots of session slots!