Fostering A Community of Scholarship Among Community College STEM Faculty Through Support for Discipline Based Education Research

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Discipline-based education research (DBER) has been growing rapidly in recent years. Much of the work undertaken by DBER scholars is applied research in live classrooms in four-year institutions with undergraduate students enrolled for course credit. Many four-year institutions have embraced DBER as a specialty area of expertise for faculty members. Meanwhile, at least half of the students taking courses in STEM disciplines at the lower division level are enrolled in community colleges. Many students who begin college as STEM majors do not succeed in lower division STEM coursework and are unable to continue their STEM studies as juniors and seniors in upper division courses in 4-year institutions. The learning difficulties that STEM majors have as freshmen and sophomores are typically at least as great in community colleges as they are in four-year institutions. Students entering community colleges have very diverse backgrounds and this means the teaching challenges faced by instructors in community colleges are manifold and sometimes unique. Although DBER scholars are able to help improve the design of lower division STEM courses, most DBER research has not been conducted by faculty members teaching in community colleges despite the importance of these colleges to the nation's higher education system. Consequently, it would be ideal to locate some expertise about how students learn STEM within the community college system. That is the goal of this project. The project will begin to address this imbalance by providing scholarly training in discipline based education research to 18 community college faculty members drawn from three community colleges in the central Midwest: Johnson County Community College, Metropolitan Community College, and Kansas City Community College. The leadership in these community colleges is supportive of this plan to provide intensive training to faculty teaching in STEM disciplines. Participants will be encouraged to participate through course releases and payment honoraria during the summertime. After several years, these new DBER scholars may be in leadership positions to help transform teaching in their institutions. This exploratory design grant will attempt to determine whether this process can take root in community colleges and be an efficient method for expanding deep knowledge about student learning to the other STEM faculty employed in community colleges.