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Metropolitan Educational Research Consortium (MERC)
The Metropolitan Educational Research Consortium, initiated in 1992, has operated continuously for 15 years. 
MERC is a partnership between VCU and seven Richmond-area urban, suburban and rural school divisions that provides a structure and process for designing and conducting applied research and disseminating the findings to local educators.
Pooling resources provided by VCU and the school divisions, MERC has sustained an active agenda for conducting applied research in school settings. The topics of investigation vary each year and some recent examples include:
- Improving middle school mathematics achievement
- Assessing effective teaching of students with autism
- Formative assessment with benchmark testing results
- Gaps in achievement and skills of high school graduates
- Needs of content area teachers in instructing ESL students
The goal of the consortium is to improve professional practice and student learning. MERC employs a structure that maintains active involvement by school superintendents and VCU faculty and administrators, as well as the use of study teams consisting of representatives from the school divisions and a VCU faculty member as the principal investigator. Regular meetings are supplemented with seminars, an annual conference, research briefs, final reports and a Web site to facilitate broad dissemination and use of the findings of the research.
Get involved
To support this program or get involved as a volunteer, contact James McMillan at jmcmillan@vcu.edu