A possibly good development for science education?

This week's Daily Pennsylvanian, the student newspaper at the University of Pennsylvania, reports on a five-year, $10 million grant from the U.S. Department of Education's Institute of Education Sciences to Penn and several other institutions to establish a 21st Century Center for Cognition and Science Instruction.

According to the Daily Pennsylvanian, the consortium will collaborate with "over 200 Pennsylvania middle schools to study how the mind receives, processes, stores and retrieves knowledge and how to improve middle school science curricula."

The Daily Pennsylvanian quotes Andrew Porter, the new dean of Penn's Graduate School of Education, as saying: "It's highly unlikely that the U.S. can continue to produce leading scientists and engineers without providing a stronger science education to our children, particularly in the critical middle-school years."

Besides Penn (both its Graduate School of Education and its Institute for Research in Cognitive Science), the other institutions involved are the University of Pittsburgh's Learning Research and Development Center, Research for Better Schools, and the 21st Century Partnership for Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics Education.

Does anyone know anything about these other institutions--in particular, how empirically based vs. dogma-driven their past ventures have been?