Building Capacity in STEM Education Research via the POGIL Community

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This project aims to promote discipline-based education research (DBER) within the Process-oriented Guided Inquiry Learning (POGIL) community of practitioners. Specifically, the project team will host a workshop for early- and mid-career POGIL practitioners led by a team of five DBER scholars. The goal of this event is to introduce current POGIL practitioners to the knowledge and skills involved in design, implementation, and methodology of STEM education research. The participants will be placed into teams of four based on their research interests. Over the following year, the teams will be supported to develop and implement a DBER project related to the POGIL approach. This support will include regular virtual meetings where one of the DBER scholars will serve as mentor. A final follow-up meeting will be held at the end of the year to assess progress and plan for future work. The participants’ extensive experience with students and POGIL learning environments will provide a rich base of practice from which to develop and investigate meaningful research questions. This project has the potential to be transformative for the sixteen veteran POGIL practitioners who will participate, positioning them to be new contributors of high-quality STEM education research. The results of their research will provide new evidence about the impact of the POGIL pedagogy on student outcomes, learning of diverse and at-risk student populations, and instructors’ teaching skills. The project is designed to develop a large research team that can explore POGIL pedagogy in multifaceted ways, thus addressing a challenge posed in the NRC’s 2012 Discipline-Based Education Research report. This project will also examine the impact of each component of the conference model, including involvement of people with existing community membership, conference session content and process, continued mentoring, and team structure. This project may help integrate the large POGIL community of practitioners more strongly with the DBER research community, thus enhancing the opportunities for research to inform STEM pedagogy and for STEM pedagogy to inform research. This project is supported by the ECR: Building Capacity in STEM Education Research competition of the EHR Core Research (ECR) program. ECR funds STEM education research projects that are focused on STEM learning and learning environment, broadening participation in STEM fields, and STEM professional workforce development.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.