Building a Solid Foundation for Multidisciplinary STEM Education Research

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Assessment/Research (91) This project is establishing a proof-of-principle for a Database for Assessment of National STEM Education Research (DANSER), a crucial piece of the core infrastructure needed to support the research culture envisioned by national leaders in STEM education. The project is collecting high-quality, research-tested assessment instruments in seven STEM fields; creating the core of a secure, user-friendly environment to store data from these assessments, integrated with data on student, classroom, and institutional characteristics; developing methods for reporting results to teachers and researchers; field-testing the system in the physics and statistics education research communities; and holding cross-disciplinary meetings of STEM teachers and researchers to plan the translation of this proof-of-principle project into STEM-wide implementation. A long-term goal is the development of a culture in STEM education research where multiple disciplines are working efficiently in parallel, sharing tools, ideas, and results. DANSER will form the nucleus of this environment. The intellectual merit of this proposal is the vast potential usefulness of a field-tested DANSER System. Pilot teaching of innovative STEM courses is occurring in many institutions of higher education. DANSER is facilitating the careful evaluation of these interventions under controlled experimental conditions to establish their impact on student learning or attitudes and their portability to other institutions and populations. This project is improving the ability of education researchers to compare student learning and attitudes in innovative courses to national norms and more readily evaluate how changes are affecting student outcomes. Broad impact is likely once STEM education researchers can draw on a consortium of institutions, already gathering consistent base-line data, to evaluate new ideas and instruments.