REU Site: Interdisciplinary Research in Undergraduate STEM Education

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North Dakota State University will conduct a summer research program to engage 30 undergraduate students in collaborative, interdisciplinary research in STEM Education. This project will foster collaboration through faculty and peer mentoring and cohort building activities. REU participants will learn qualitative and quantitative research methods, scientific communication skills, and become familiar with career paths in STEM Education. The ultimate goal of this project is to promote the matriculation of talented students to graduate programs in what is referred to as discipline-based education research (DBER). This project builds on a prior NSF award that has produced publishable results in the area of DBER. Through this project REU students will be able to select from a wide variety of undergraduate research projects that pose important questions about the nature of assessment, reasoning, and the impact of learning assistants, crossing many STEM disciplines. The students will prepare for their research experience by reading and discussing assigned papers and participating in IRB training (both done online) before they arrive at the REU site. The benefit of this prior, virtual mentoring will be twofold; the students will receive essential training in education research, an area that may not be familiar to them and they will begin to build relationships with their research mentors. During the project the students will participate in a well-structured professional development seminar through which they will address ethical practices, careers in STEM, and pathways to graduate school. Formative evaluation will provide feedback necessary to refine the project each year through information gathered from entrance and exit surveys, the Survey of Undergraduate Research Experiences, the Experimental Design Ability Test, and interviews with students. Summative evaluation activities will include REU student exit interviews, an exit survey, and tracking of students' career trajectories through follow-up surveys.