The US National Science Foundation’s broader-impacts criterion, in force since the mid-1990s and refreshed periodically since, received its most significant revision in 2024 with rolling implementation through 2025-2026. The new policy sharpens what counts as a credible broader-impacts plan, what evidence applicants need to provide, and how reviewers should weight the criterion. This post is a practical orientation for applicants and research-administration offices handling NSF proposals in 2026.
Broader impacts, briefly
NSF merit review uses two co-equal criteria: intellectual merit (the scientific value of the proposed work) and broader impacts (the benefits to society beyond the immediate science). Broader impacts can be of many kinds: education and training of students, public engagement, infrastructure development, dissemination beyond peer-reviewed venues, increased participation of under-represented groups in STEM, partnerships with industry or non-academic users, contributions to national interests including economic competitiveness and security.
The criterion has been criticised since its introduction for being weakly evaluated, for being treated as an afterthought to intellectual merit, and for accepting plausibility statements in lieu of evidence-based plans. The 2024 revision is the NSF’s response to those criticisms.
What the new policy changes
Three substantive changes.
First, evidence-based planning. The new policy expects broader-impacts plans to be grounded in evidence from the broader-impacts and informal-STEM-learning literature. An applicant claiming that a proposed K-12 outreach activity will improve student interest in science needs to ground that claim in published evidence about what works in K-12 STEM engagement, not just assert it. The policy explicitly references the work of Bevan, Falk, Dierking, and others in the informal-learning research community.
Second, measurable outcomes. Plans must specify what success looks like in observable terms, what data will be collected to assess success, and how the assessment will be conducted. Vague aspirations (“will inspire the next generation of scientists”) are not sufficient; observable indicators are required. The policy stops short of requiring randomised controlled trials of outreach activities but moves substantively toward evaluation rigour.
Third, integration with intellectual merit. The policy emphasises that broader impacts should be substantively connected to the research, not bolted on as a separable activity. A proposal whose broader-impacts plan is a generic education-outreach activity unrelated to the science is now explicitly weaker than a proposal whose broader-impacts plan extends the science in directions that benefit specific communities.
What this means for applicants
The practical implications. First, build the broader-impacts plan into the proposal narrative, not into a separate annex. Show the connection between the science and the broader impact. The CASRAI NSF applicant guide walks through structural patterns that integrate the two.
Second, cite evidence. If you propose outreach to under-represented groups, cite published evidence about effective interventions for those groups. If you propose a teacher-development workshop, cite the literature on effective teacher development. The expectation is not that applicants become broader-impacts researchers; it is that the plan is grounded in someone’s research, with citations.
Third, specify the assessment. What will you measure? How will you measure it? Who will analyse the data? A typical strong assessment specifies: outcome measure (e.g., self-reported student interest in STEM career on a validated instrument); data collection (pre/post survey administration); analysis plan (paired-difference test with effect-size reporting); reporting venue (project annual report plus a conference paper).
Fourth, partner with people who do this work. Researchers who are not broader-impacts specialists should partner with informal-STEM-education professionals, with community-engagement specialists at their institution, with K-12 educators who can co-design and assess interventions. The partnerships should be visible in the proposal: who is doing the work, what their qualifications are, what their role is.
What this means for research administration
Research-administration offices supporting NSF proposals should be upskilling around the new policy. Three priorities. First, build a broader-impacts library: a curated set of evidence-based plans, vetted partners, and assessment instruments that researchers can adapt. Second, offer structured proposal-development support that includes broader-impacts review by someone qualified to assess the evidence base. Third, support post-award assessment: the broader-impacts assessment plans now in proposals need to be executed during the award and reported in the final project report.
The CASRAI institutional broader-impacts guide includes a checklist for research-administration offices building this capacity.
How reviewers should evaluate
NSF’s revised reviewer guidance asks reviewers to evaluate broader impacts on the same evidence-based and outcome-specified terms. A reviewer should ask: is the plan grounded in evidence? Are the outcomes measurable? Is the assessment credible? Is the broader-impacts work integrated with the research?
This is a substantive shift. Pre-2024 reviewer guidance often produced broader-impacts ratings that reflected the reviewer’s gestalt impression of the applicant’s commitment. The new guidance pushes toward more analytic evaluation, with the explicit recognition that broader impacts is a domain with its own expertise and its own literature.
The wider implications
Three wider implications worth noting.
First, the policy normalises broader-impacts research as a discipline. NSF has historically funded broader-impacts research thinly; the new policy implicitly raises the visibility of the field and the demand for its outputs. We expect funding for broader-impacts research itself to increase in subsequent budget cycles.
Second, the policy aligns with the international move toward structured impact reporting. The UK’s Research Excellence Framework impact case studies, the EU’s Horizon Europe expected-impact framework, and several other funder frameworks all push in similar directions. CASRAI’s engagement, impact, and SDG domain tracks the international landscape.
Third, the policy creates a soft incentive toward partnerships between research-intensive universities and the institutions (community colleges, K-12 systems, science museums, community organisations) that have broader-impacts capacity. The partnerships, where they work, are mutually beneficial; where they do not, broader impacts becomes a service-delivery problem dressed as a research-grant activity.
Open questions
Two open questions for 2026 and beyond. First, the resource implications: an evidence-based broader-impacts plan with a real assessment costs money, sometimes a substantial fraction of the project budget. NSF has signalled that meaningful broader-impacts costs are budgetable and reviewable on their merits, but the budget pressure is real, particularly for small grants. Second, the equity implications: applicants from research-intensive universities have easier access to broader-impacts capacity than applicants from less-resourced institutions. The new policy may inadvertently widen the gap between institution categories. NSF is aware of this risk and the next policy update is expected to address it.
For applicants in 2026, the operating posture is to take the new policy seriously, partner with people who do this work, ground your plan in evidence, specify the assessment, and integrate broader impacts with the research. The bar has risen; the proposals that clear it will be substantially stronger than the pre-2024 baseline.
