EAGER: Research Design and Rigor in NSF funded Education Research Projects: A Time Series Analysis of the Engineering Education and Chemical Education Research Communities

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Discipline-based education research (DBER) in STEM fields has received wide-spread attention and praise for overcoming the traditional schism between disciplinary STEM technical research and STEM education research. DBER scholars are creating new knowledge and learning theories that are discipline-relevant and context-specific. Nevertheless, the emergence and practice of DBER has not come without challenges: (1) building of human research capacity takes time and effort, (2) advanced and sophisticated research designs might not be chosen by novice education researchers, (3) the variation in quality and methodological rigor represents a challenge inherent to any nascent research community working to establish itself, (4) DBER communities are criticized for being insular to each other and towards the larger education research community, and (5) the acceptance of DBER research as equal scholarship within STEM communities might be low at first. In 2013, a joint publication by the National Science Foundation, the US Department of Education, and the Institute of Education Sciences produced the "Common Guidelines for Education Research and Development" offering scholars an overall framework for different types of educational research projects. Although these guidelines codify an existing standard for quality assurance and best practice, the extent to which these guidelines represent the current practice of research in DBER communities has not been investigated. As such, the merit of this project is to provide an essential understanding of common patterns of research practice in two DBER communities - engineering education and chemical education. Findings from this project have the potential to inform not only the education of the next generation of DBER researchers and communities, but also to increase capacity and quality of pursued STEM education research. This project is unique in that it analyzes and compares research practice of two DBER communities, engineering education and chemical education, with a time-series approach. This project addresses four urgent needs that are essential to understanding common patterns of research practice: (1) the need to build awareness and improve research practice across disciplines, (2) the need to increase collaboration on common issues, (3) the need to allow for broader discussion of educational research traditions and processes, and (4) the need to produce empirical results and knowledge that can be shared across different disciplines and research communities. A developmental approach is used to define these two DBER communities by their scholarly products and publications, and not by their organizations and publication venues. This approach allows higher sensitivity towards nascent fields and DBER communities, which include researchers who are starting to add a secondary research field. Research findings from this project have the potential to inform funding policies at agencies that support STEM education research and provide insight on the state of the art of DBER fields.