Building Capacity in STEM Education Research via the POGIL Community

该项目旨在促进基于学科的教育研究（DBER）在面向过程的指导性探究学习（POGIL）实践者社区。具体来说，项目团队将为早期和中期职业POGIL从业者举办一个研讨会，由五名DBER学者组成的团队领导。本次活动的目的是向目前的POGIL从业者介绍STEM教育研究的设计、实施和方法论所涉及的知识和技能。参与者将根据他们的研究兴趣被分成四人一组。在接下来的一年中，将支持这些团队开发和实施与POGIL方法相关的DBER项目。这种支持将包括定期的虚拟会议，其中一名DBER学者将担任导师。年底将举行最后一次后续会议，以评估进展情况并规划今后的工作。参与者与学生和POGIL学习环境的丰富经验将为开发和调查有意义的研究问题提供丰富的实践基础。该项目有可能为16名将参与的资深POGIL从业者带来变革，使他们成为高质量STEM教育研究的新贡献者。他们的研究结果将为POGIL教学法对学生成绩、对不同和有风险的学生群体的学习以及教师的教学技能的影响提供新的证据。该项目旨在建立一个大型研究团队，以多方面的方式探索POGIL教学法，从而解决NRC 2012年基于学科的教育研究报告中提出的挑战。该项目还将检查会议模式的每个组成部分的影响，包括现有社区成员的参与、会议内容和流程、持续的指导和团队结构。该项目可能有助于将大型POGIL从业者社区与DBER研究社区更紧密地整合在一起，从而增加研究为STEM教学法提供信息的机会，以及STEM教学法为研究提供信息的机会。该项目得到了EHR核心研究（ECR）项目ECR: STEM教育研究能力建设竞赛的支持。ECR资助STEM教育研究项目，重点关注STEM学习和学习环境，扩大STEM领域的参与，以及STEM专业劳动力的发展。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。

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.