Collaborative Research: Working meetings to break down theoretical and disciplinary silos in research on change in undergraduate STEM education

为了加强对所有学生的本科科学、技术、工程和数学（STEM）教育，需要在我们的高校中更广泛地实施有有力证据证明其有效性的教学实践和课程。要实现这一目标，需要高等教育机构、院系和教职员工改变当前的政策和做法。关于这种改变的理论来自不同的学科。由此产生的文献的复杂性和广度使得识别、理解和应用相关理论具有挑战性。此外，大多数关于本科STEM教育变革的调查都集中在单一举措上，因此需要许多研究的结果来完善变革理论并确定有意义变革的方法。因此，有必要对这些理论进行严格的、分析性的综合，以及如何利用它们来促进本科STEM教育的有意义的变革。该项目的目标是打破理论和学科孤岛，并建立能力，以更有效地调查，理解和促进加强本科STEM教育的变革。这个改进本科STEM教育项目将召集一系列面对面和虚拟会议，研究本科教育系统变化的研究人员将综合和组织变化理论。在此过程中，这些会议将建立社区并增强研究本科STEM教育系统性变化的能力。会议将包括大约20名来自不同STEM学科的基于学科的教育研究人员，他们是研究变化的新兴学者，以及本科STEM系统变化的国家领导者。在这些会议上完成的工作将有助于研究者在STEM教育研究中更好地利用相关的变化理论。这项工作的成果将通过期刊文章、维基百科页面和加速系统变革网络网站分享。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

To enhance undergraduate Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) education for all students, instructional practices and curricula with robust evidence of their effectiveness need to be more widely implemented in our colleges and universities. Accomplishing this goal will require institutions of higher education, their departments, and faculty members to change current policies and practices. Theories about making such changes come from diverse disciplines. The resulting complexity and breadth of the literature makes it challenging to identify, understand, and apply relevant theories. Additionally, most investigations of change in undergraduate STEM education focus on a single initiative, so the results of many studies are needed to refine theories of change and to identify approaches for meaningful change. Thus, there is a need for a rigorous, analytical synthesis of these theories and how they might be used to promote meaningful change in undergraduate STEM education. The goals of this project are to break down theoretical and disciplinary silos, and to build capacity to more effectively investigate, understand, and facilitate changes that enhance undergraduate STEM education.This Improving Undergraduate STEM Education project will convene a series of in-person and virtual meetings in which researchers who investigate systemic change in undergraduate education will synthesize and organize theories of change. In the process, these meetings will build community and enhanced capacity for research on systemic change in undergraduate STEM education. Meetings will include about 20 discipline-based education researchers from different STEM disciplines who are emerging scholars studying change, as well as national leaders in systemic change in undergraduate STEM. The work accomplished in these meetings will help investigators make better use of relevant theories of change in their STEM education research. The products of this work will be shared via journal articles as well as Wikipedia pages and the Accelerating Systemic Change Network website.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.