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

STEM领域的学科教育研究因克服了学科技术研究与STEM教育研究之间的传统割裂而受到广泛关注和赞誉。DBER学者正在创造新的知识和学习理论，这些知识和学习理论与学科相关，并与背景相关。然而，DBER的出现和实践并非没有挑战：(1)人类研究能力的建设需要时间和努力，(2)新手教育研究人员可能不会选择先进和复杂的研究设计，(3)质量和方法的严谨性的差异是任何新生的研究界努力建立自己的固有挑战，(4)DBER社区被批评彼此孤立，对更大的教育研究社区，以及(5)在STEM社区内接受DBER研究作为平等学术可能一开始很低。2013年，美国国家科学基金会、美国教育部和教育科学研究所联合出版了《教育研究与发展共同指南》，为学者们提供了不同类型教育研究项目的总体框架。虽然这些指南编纂了质量保证和最佳实践的现有标准，但这些指南在多大程度上代表了DBER社区的当前研究实践，尚未得到调查。因此，这个项目的价值在于提供了对两个DBER社区--工程教育和化学教育--的共同研究实践模式的基本了解。该项目的成果不仅有可能为下一代DBER研究人员和社区的教育提供信息，而且还有可能提高所从事的STEM教育研究的能力和质量。这个项目的独特之处在于，它用时间序列的方法分析和比较了工程教育和化学教育这两个DBER社区的研究实践。该项目解决了对理解研究实践的共同模式至关重要的四个迫切需要：(1)需要提高认识并改进跨学科的研究实践，(2)需要在共同问题上加强合作，(3)需要允许对教育研究传统和程序进行更广泛的讨论，以及(4)需要产生可在不同学科和研究界共享的经验结果和知识。用发展的方法来定义这两个DBER社区是根据它们的学术产品和出版物，而不是它们的组织和出版场所。这种方法允许对新生的领域和DBER社区有更高的敏感性，其中包括开始增加辅助研究领域的研究人员。该项目的研究结果有可能为支持STEM教育研究的机构的资助政策提供参考，并提供对DBER领域最新技术的洞察。

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.