RCN: INTERACT: An Incubator to Enable Scalable Education Equity Research with Terracotta

改善教育公平对国家进步至关重要，特别是在科学、技术、工程和数学(STEM)领域，在这些领域，基于社会人口特征的不平等现象非常明显。为了纠正这些不平等，需要进行研究，以了解STEM学习环境中的教育实践和线索，以及它们对学生心理的影响。这些实践和提示包括教师、教职员工和管理人员所说和所做的，他们的政策和教学实践，他们与学生的互动，以及他们为学生之间的互动设定的规范。这些情境因素很重要，因为它们会对学生在STEM领域的学习、动机、成就和坚持性产生影响。尽管成功和公平的STEM教育在全国具有重要意义，但仍然非常需要基本工具和基础设施，以支持STEM学习环境中严格、可扩展的研究。然而，在教育数字化转型的推动下，新一代研究基础设施最近开始出现。随着教师和学校越来越多地使用数字平台进行教学、课堂作业、共享资源、学生互动以及数据收集和存储，有机会利用这些数字平台来填补教育研究基础设施的空白。Terracotta是一种新兴的研究工具，它使得在实验中操纵数字学习环境的许多功能成为可能，同时也为学生隐私和机构提供强有力的保护。为了确保兵马俑满足高优先级研究的需求，这个中等规模的研究基础设施孵化器项目将召集研究教育、学习和社会公平的不同研究人员网络，以及教育领域的技术专家和利益相关者，并将确定共识的基础设施要求。孵化器成员将接受关于促进教育公平的过程的尖端发现的培训，并将协作设想兵马俑如何发展成为推动这项研究的国家基础设施。该项目将分三个阶段进行：(1)需求评估：确定高影响力的研究需求，以考察情景和教学线索对STEM结果的影响；(2)基础设施设计：共同创建基础设施解决方案，以满足第一阶段确定的一系列研究需求；(3)综合：将孵化器产品纳入共识研究基础设施计划。在第一和第二阶段，孵化器成员将在为期数天的面对面会议上开会，以确定研究问题和所需的相应基础设施，以实现更大的STEM教育公平。在第三阶段，指导委员会将把孵化器产品综合为国家STEM教育研究基础设施的连贯计划。此外，InterAct孵化器还通过构建种族和性别多元化的研究人员、利益相关者和研究生受训人员社区，积极推动STEM教育研究队伍的多元化，这些人属于孵化器的产品，构成了STEM教育公平研究的未来。该项目通过与比尔和梅琳达·盖茨基金会、施密特期货公司和沃尔顿家庭基金会的合作伙伴关系得到支持。资金也由NSF的EDU核心研究计划提供。这一奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力优势和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

Improving equity in education is essential to national progress, particularly in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) fields, where inequities based on sociodemographic characteristics are pronounced. To remedy these inequities, research is needed to understand educational practices and cues in the STEM learning environment, and their psychological impacts on students. These practices and cues include what teachers, staff, and administrators say and do, their policies and instructional practices, their interactions with students, and the norms they set for students’ interactions with one another. These situational factors are important because they causally impact students' learning, motivation, achievement, and persistence in STEM fields. Despite the national importance of successful and equitable STEM education, there is still great need for basic tools and infrastructure to support rigorous, scalable research within STEM learning environments. However, a new generation of research infrastructure has recently begun to emerge, enabled by the digital transformation of education. As teachers and schools increasingly use digital platforms for instruction, class assignments, sharing resources, student interaction, and data collection and storage, there is an opportunity to leverage these digital platforms to fill education research infrastructure gaps. Terracotta is an emerging research tool that makes it possible to experimentally manipulate many of these capabilities of the digital learning environment, while also providing robust protections for student privacy and agency. To ensure that Terracotta addresses the needs of high priority research studies, this Mid-scale Research Infrastructure Incubator project will convene a diverse network of researchers who study education, learning, and social equity, as well as technologists and stakeholders in education, and will identify consensus infrastructure requirements. Incubator members will receive training on cutting-edge findings about processes that foster equity in education and will collaboratively envision how Terracotta can develop into a national infrastructure that advances this research. The project will occur in three phases: (1) Needs Assessment: Identifying high-impact research needs for examining the influence of situational and instructional cues on STEM outcomes; (2) Infrastructure Design: Co-creation of infrastructure solutions for filling the range of research needs identified in Phase 1; and (3) Synthesis: Integrating the incubator products into a consensus research infrastructure plan. In Phases 1 and 2, incubator members will meet at multi-day in-person convenings to identify research questions, and the corresponding infrastructure needed, to lead to greater STEM education equity. In Phase 3, the steering committee will synthesize incubator products into a coherent plan for national STEM education research infrastructure. Additionally, the INTERACT incubator also makes active strides toward diversifying the STEM education research workforce, by constructing a community of racially and gender diverse researchers, stakeholders, and graduate trainees who are vested in the incubator’s products and who constitute the future of STEM education equity research. This project is supported through a partnership with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Schmidt Futures, and the Walton Family Foundation. Funding is also provided by NSF’s EDU Core Research 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.