Still, this is only about five percent of the total number of NSF awards. During the past decade, the minority funding rate has usually been 1-3 percentage points below the overall funding rate. Proposals have remained fairly level while the number of awards has increased only slightly. In FY 2001, NSF will build on the results of this goal by targeting the reviewer pool. One possible reason for this trend is that prior PIs are more likely to cite the results of previously funded projects in their subsequent proposals.
Reviewers tend to favor PIs with proven track records.
In order to encourage the proposal process to be open to new people and ideas, NSF has established an FY 2000 GPRA performance goal of 30 percent of competitive research grants going to new investigators . As discussed on page 16, the FY 2000 result was 27 percent. In FY 2001 NSF will increase its efforts to promote awareness of the research opportunities at NSF open to new investigators. Award Amounts Data on median and average award amounts 4 from FY 1996-2000 are presented by directorate in Appendix Table 3 and Text Figure 3 . Adequate award size is important both to getting high quality proposals and to ensuring that proposed work can be accomplished as planned.