REU Site: Growing up STEM: An Interdisciplinary Research Experience in Undergraduate STEM Education

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To enhance learning in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM), we need to better understand how students acquire and use STEM knowledge, and how instructors can help students learn. Discipline-based education researchers (DBERs) contribute to this understanding by applying their STEM expertise to the study of teaching and learning. DBER is a relatively young field and we need to train more scholars to do this important research. This Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REU) Site at North Dakota State University (NDSU) will address this need by hosting a summer program that will engage 30 undergraduate students in conducting discipline-based education research in science and mathematics.Through this REU Site, the student participants will select from a wide variety of research projects that pose important questions about the nature of teaching and learning in STEM. The interdisciplinary team of faculty mentors provides a diverse set of projects across the disciplines of biology, chemistry, mathematics, physics and psychology. This diversity in research exposes REU participants to nearly a dozen other projects to enrich their experience with and understanding of the breadth of investigations conducted in DBER. Students will jump-start their research experience through online interactions with their mentors, including reading and discussing relevant research papers. The benefits of this early, virtual mentoring will be two-fold: students receive essential training in education research and begin to develop relationships with their research mentors prior to arriving on campus. Once they arrive at NDSU, the REU fellows will participate in a learning community that includes cohort-building activities, as well as both faculty and peer mentoring to support their research activities. REU students will also participate in a well-structured professional development series in which they will learn about ethical practices; research methods; scientific communication and presentation skills; pathways to graduate school; and careers in STEM. Students will present their research and results through informal chalk talks in the first half of the program and then more formally at a capstone poster symposium at the end of the summer. In addition to summative evaluation, the project team will implement continuous formative evaluation to provide feedback that helps them refine and improve the REU Site each year. Student entrance and exit surveys, student interviews, faculty surveys, and alumni follow-up surveys will provide essential data for continuous program improvement. Overall, this REU Site will build the discipline-based education research talent pool and contribute to improvements in undergraduate STEM education.The Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REU) program supports active research participation by undergraduate students in areas of research funded by NSF. This REU project is supported by NSF's Education & Human Resources Directorate Core Research (ECR) Program and its Improving Undergraduate STEM Education (IUSE) Program.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.