Effective: 2024-2026

Funding Type: BCSER IID

Principal Investigator: Benjamin Kelcey

Institution: University of Cincinnati Main Campus

This project aims to serve the national interest by developing explanatory machine learning methods for the study of teaching effectiveness in STEM education. There is consistent evidence that teachers vary widely in their effectiveness but conventional analytic methods have largely failed to explain why and under what contexts teaching and teachers vary. Explanatory machine learning methods hold significant potential in developing fundamental knowledge and theories of equitable and effective...

Effective: 2024-2026

Funding Type: BCSER Institute

Principal Investigator: Odis D Johnson Jr

Institution: Johns Hopkins University

This project extends the training and community building activities of the Institute in Critical Quantitative, Computational, and Mixed Methods (ICQCM), a data science training institute established in 2019. The project seeks to increase the number of faculty and postdoctoral researchers who utilize quantitative and computational research methods in research on populations underrepresented in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields of study. The goals are to enable...

Effective: 2024-2026

Funding Type: BCSER IID

Principal Investigator: Prateek Shekhar

Institution: New Jersey Institute of Technology

This project aims to serve the national interest by advancing the understanding of undergraduate engineering students' participation in entrepreneurship education programs. Entrepreneurship and innovation are important for economic success, and engineers often hold a central role in leading innovation in today's high-technology world. To compete successfully in the global technological innovation economy, graduating engineers need to possess entrepreneurial skills to identify opportunities and...

Effective: 2024-2026

Funding Type: BCSER IID

Principal Investigator: Mariana Castro

Institution: University of Wisconsin-Madison

Multilingual learners are the fastest growing student population in the United States. Therefore, it is concerning that they have shown poor performance on national science assessments. Despite this concern, few teachers report feeling prepared to engage them in science instruction. This project aims to prepare science teachers to increase their knowledge, skill and efficacy in facilitating multilingual learners' engagement in scientific argumentation, which is an essential skill in science...

Effective: 2023-2028

Funding Type: ECR:Core

Principal Investigator: Ana C Stephens

Institution: University of Wisconsin-Madison

This project aims to improve understanding of the relationships between students’ knowledge of fractions and their knowledge of algebra. Success in algebra is an important determinant of life outcomes, from high school graduation to college access and career and economic prospects. Unfortunately, a broad swath of research has documented the struggles students face learning algebra. Findings from both psychology and mathematics education research suggest that enhancing students’ fraction...

Effective: 2023-2028

Funding Type: ECR:Core

Principal Investigator: Zhe Wang

Institution: Texas A&M University

Proficiency in math is ever important in a society that increasingly relies on science and technology. Yet, a diverse range of negative emotions may develop to impede math learning. Math anxiety is such a negative math emotion that it is of great concern to researchers and educators. Students with math anxiety experience feelings of fear and apprehension in math-related activities. These students often have lower math achievement and lower participation in math-related careers compared to...

Effective: 2023-2028

Funding Type: CAREER

Principal Investigator: Yolanda Rankin

Institution: Florida State University

The Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) program is a National Science Foundation-wide activity that offers awards in support of early-career faculty who have the potential to serve as academic role models in research and education, to lead advances in the mission of their department or organization, and to build a foundation for a lifetime of leadership in integrating education and research. This CAREER project explores the postsecondary experiences of Black women currently enrolled in...

Effective: 2023-2028

Funding Type: ECR:Core

Principal Investigator: Claire W Wladis

Institution: CUNY Borough of Manhattan Community College

This project will directly investigate which factors impact student decisions to enroll and persist in mathematics majors in the two-year college context. There is a well-documented need to increase the diversity of the STEM and mathematics workforce, including increasing the number of students from marginalized groups who enroll in and complete mathematics degrees. Given the fact that half of all mathematics majors are enrolled at two-year colleges, if we hope to address long-standing issues...

Effective: 2023-2028

Funding Type: ECR:Core

Principal Investigators: Kendra S Cheruvelil, Isis H Settles

Institutions: Michigan State University, Regents of the University of Michigan - Ann Arbor

Higher education has struggled to make meaningful progress in broadening the participation in STEM at all levels. Person-Environment Fit (PE Fit) research reveals that education and career outcomes are improved by having an organizational environment that is congruent with one’s needs, skills, and values. Because PE Fit is theorized at multiple organizational levels, this study will examine inclusive climate at the levels of the STEM research group, department, and academic discipline. This...

Effective: 2023-2028

Funding Type: CAREER

Principal Investigator: Nicole Pitterson

Institution: Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University

Introductory engineering courses may seem alienating to many undergraduates when fundamental concepts are presented primarily through highly technical language, unfamiliar metaphors and analogies, and complex abstractions. This sense of alienation may be particularly acute when students’ educational backgrounds, prior experiences, and linguistic practices are not reflected in engineering instructors’ written or verbal examples and course materials. To counter this sense, the purpose of this...

Effective: 2023-2028

Funding Type: ECR:Core

Principal Investigator: Elizabeth Bonawitz

Institution: Harvard University

The purpose of this study is to compare the results of two teaching styles: direct instruction and guided query, for early elementary students in science. Guided queries -- when teachers ask questions that engage the learner in prediction, explanation, and reflection -- have been shown to support knowledge building and motivation in brief lab settings. However, there is disagreement among scholars about how the learning outcomes of guided query teaching styles compare to those of direct...

Effective: 2023-2028

Funding Type: CAREER

Principal Investigator: Elizabeth Dorrance Hall

Institution: Michigan State University

The Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) program is a National Science Foundation-wide activity that offers awards in support of early-career faculty who have the potential to serve as academic role models in research and education, to lead advances in the mission of their department or organization, and to build a foundation for a lifetime of leadership in integrating education and research. This CAREER project investigates how parental messages facilitate the resilience of girls and...

Effective: 2023-2028

Funding Type: CAREER

Principal Investigator: Joshua Hartshorne

Institution: Boston College

Basic research into understanding how children learn physics concepts has been pursued relatively independently in several different disciplines (cognitive psychology, developmental science, and physics education research), each of which has come to very different conclusions. One research literature suggests that people's pre-educational intuitions about mechanical physics are largely veridical, another literature suggests that these intuitions are largely incorrect, and yet another suggests...

Effective: 2023-2028

Funding Type: CAREER

Principal Investigator: Rene F Kizilcec

Institution: Cornell University

Predictive learning analytics (PLA) that have a focus on identifying students at risk of failing are gaining traction with leaders at all levels of education. The effective adoption and use of PLA in the US education system can promote educational attainment, STEM workforce development, and national development by supporting lower-resourced educational institutions and members of underserved communities. Prior research has focused on enhancing the technical implementation of these AI-based...

Effective: 2023-2028

Funding Type: ECR:Core

Principal Investigators: Mary Fuhs, Elizabeth A Gunderson

Institutions: University of Dayton, Temple University

Mathematical skills are essential for STEM careers, as well as crucial tools in everyday life, from financial planning to medical decision-making. Unfortunately, many students fail to reach their potential in these skills. One of the challenges that preschool-aged children face when acquiring an understanding of numbers is distinguishing between numerical magnitudes (like three elephants) and spatial magnitudes (like the size of an elephant). Prior research suggests that children often focus on...

Effective: 2023-2028

Funding Type: CAREER

Principal Investigator: Yuko Okado

Institution: CSU Fullerton Auxiliary Services Corporation

The Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) program is a National Science Foundation-wide activity that offers awards in support of early-career faculty who have the potential to serve as academic role models in research and education, to lead advances in the mission of their department or organization, and to build a foundation for a lifetime of leadership in integrating education and research. This CAREER project aims to broaden participation in the science, technology, engineering, and...

Effective: 2023-2028

Funding Type: ECR:Core

Principal Investigator: Paulo Carvalho

Institution: Carnegie-Mellon University

Mastering material in STEM classes requires students to learn and memorize large amounts of new knowledge in a short period of time. One way that has long been argued to improve such learning is by having students practice new knowledge by spacing questions over time (spaced retrieval practice). However, the evidence for the benefits of spaced retrieval practice in STEM contexts is limited. Through multiple classroom studies involving thousands of STEM students across different US middle and...

Effective: 2023-2028

Funding Type: ECR:Core

Principal Investigators: NiCole T Buchanan, Martinque K Jones, Isis H Settles

Institutions: Michigan State University, University of North Texas, Regents of the University of Michigan - Ann Arbor

The proposed project examines whether and how epistemic exclusion, a form of scholarly devaluation, is a barrier to the full inclusion and participation of women faculty and faculty of color in STEM. Epistemic exclusion occurs when disciplinary biases defining what STEM scholarship is valued are coupled with negative stereotypes about productivity and commitment of individuals based on their social identities to produce unfair evaluation processes. Because many faculty career outcomes (such as...

Effective: 2023-2028

Funding Type: CAREER

Principal Investigator: Emily G Peterson

Institution: American University

This project will investigate the role that curiosity plays in students’ learning about scientific phenomena. Curiosity is a hallmark of scientific discovery and can propel students to ask questions, explore scientific ideas, enhance memory, and boost persistence during learning. Yet, studies of curiosity have mostly focused on whether curiosity increases learning rather than how curiosity increases learning. Therefore, to understand how curiosity impacts learning about scientific phenomena,...

Effective: 2023-2028

Funding Type: ECR:Core

Principal Investigator: Julia A Leonard

Institution: Yale University

Acquiring scientific knowledge and skills requires persisting through challenges, yet it has become increasingly common for parents in the United States to step in and solve problems for their children. This type of over-engaged parenting leads preschool-age children to have lower persistence, lower executive function, and worse reading and math achievement in grade school across socioeconomic backgrounds. However, prior work leaves open major theoretical and practical questions about the...

Effective: 2023-2028

Funding Type: CAREER

Principal Investigator: Tolani A Britton

Institution: University of California-Berkeley

The Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) program is a National Science Foundation-wide activity that offers awards in support of early-career faculty who have the potential to serve as academic role models in research and education, to lead advances in the mission of their department or organization, and to build a foundation for a lifetime of leadership in integrating education and research. This CAREER project explores the postsecondary trajectories of persons with conviction histories...

Effective: 2023-2028

Funding Type: ECR:Core

Principal Investigator: Nora S Newcombe

Institution: Temple University

Spatial thinking is related to success in STEM disciplines. However, existing research has largely focused on small-scale spatial skills, such as mentally rotating objects. There is a critical need for research on how large-scale spatial skills, such as navigation and mapping, are related to success in STEM success, especially in the formative period of late childhood and early adolescence. This project will develop, implement, and evaluate a set of new tools and will gather new knowledge...

Effective: 2023-2028

Funding Type: CAREER

Principal Investigator: Hwa Young Lee

Institution: Texas State University - San Marcos

Graph literacy, the ability to comprehend, interpret, and use graphical representations, is critical for students to learn mathematics, to succeed in STEM coursework and careers, and to engage in informed participation in society. Undoubtedly, understanding and supporting students’ development of graph literacy is an important task educators, researchers, and curricula developers collectively share. Studies have documented secondary school students’ difficulties with graphical...

Effective: 2023-2028

Funding Type: CAREER

Principal Investigator: Samantha Viano

Institution: George Mason University

Online STEM credit courses have become attractive to school leaders as a way to support students who fail STEM courses in face-to-face school year settings. However, there is little research about the processes involved in how schools make decisions regarding student credit recovery. The available research focuses solely on student results and is not definitive enough to support important policy decisions at the district level. This research brings redress to this policy dilemma. The researcher...

Effective: 2023-2028

Funding Type: CAREER

Principal Investigator: Zhen Bai

Institution: University of Rochester

Children are increasingly impacted by technological advances in artificial intelligence (AI) that provide personalized recommendations regarding the books they read, individualized lessons, career-path plans, and friend circles. As smart learning companions (for example, animated intelligent characters/agents) become popular, children are at risk of overestimating and over-trusting AI given their tendency to anthropomorphize such intelligent systems. This CAREER project investigates the...

Effective: 2023-2027

Funding Type: ECR:Core

Principal Investigator: Andrew Katz

Institution: Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University

The work engineers do and the designs they create have long-term, often unforeseen, impacts on people, infrastructure, and the environment. To help ensure that the results of engineering work advance human and environmental well-being, we need to first understand how engineers currently connect their technical work to these broader contexts and systems. To achieve this understanding, this project will integrate cognitive and behavioral science, social theory, and advanced computational methods...

Effective: 2023-2027

Funding Type: ECR:Core

Principal Investigators: Thomas D Griffin, Allison J Jaeger, Nicole LaDue

Institutions: University of Illinois at Chicago, Mississippi State University, Northern Illinois University

Analogies pervade textbooks and other teaching materials in geology and other STEM fields. "The Earth's crust is like a multi-layered cake with many different colors of icing." This is an example of an analogy used to teach geology. Anaologies are widely thought to be effective teaching tools because they take something that students are already familiar with and relate it to a new unfamiliar concept. But this same feature could potentially lead to illusions of understanding. Students may...

Effective: 2023-2027

Funding Type: ECR:Core

Principal Investigator: Melissa R Beck

Institution: Louisiana State University

Despite the growing demand for STEM professionals, many students face challenges in completing STEM degree programs due to difficulties in mastering the content. One crucial predictor of success in STEM disciplines is spatial reasoning ability, which involves mentally manipulating and representing objects in space. However, STEM courses often neglect the purposeful development of spatial reasoning skills, and limited knowledge exists on effective training methods. This project aims to address...

Effective: 2023-2027

Funding Type: ECR:Core

Principal Investigators: Naomi Jessup, Crystal A Kalinec-Craig, Jonathan Thomas

Institutions: Georgia State University Research Foundation, Inc., University of Texas at San Antonio, University of Kentucky Research Foundation

Preparing teachers to create equitable mathematics classrooms is an ongoing challenge for teacher education. This begins with helping teachers focus on children's strengths and identities as mathematics learners. Then, teachers need to be able to respond to children's experiences, knowledge, and mathematical reasoning when planning and teaching. This is particularly important for groups that have been historically marginalized in mathematics (e.g., Black, Latinx, Indigenous, Asian American...

Effective: 2023-2027

Funding Type: ECR:Core

Principal Investigator: Julie R Posselt

Institution: University of Southern California

How universities make the decisions that affect access to higher education are a root cause of racial, gender, and socioeconomic inequalities in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM). Particularly given changes to the legal landscape for considering race in admissions, it is urgent to develop tools that reduce racial bias in admissions decisions. More higher education institutions are adopting rubrics in admissions, particularly as test-optional and test-free become the new...

Effective: 2023-2027

Funding Type: ECR:Core

Principal Investigator: Min Sun

Institution: University of Washington

Planning and selecting instructional materials is one of the most complex and important components of mathematics teaching. As online instructional materials continue to proliferate, schools and educators are relying on them in addition to textbooks. While there are advantages to open educational resources that are freely available, questions about ensuring their quality and utility to teachers and students remain paramount. An important contribution of this study is identifying ways to measure...

Effective: 2023-2027

Funding Type: ECR:Core

Principal Investigator: Rachael Robnett

Institution: University of Nevada Las Vegas

Efforts to broaden and diversify the STEM workforce include programs that engage undergraduate STEM students in conducting scientific research with faculty mentors. Although there is evidence that these mentoring relationships can be beneficial, there is also evidence of variations in student outcomes from these experiences. Existing research provides limited insight into why some students thrive in these mentored research experiences while others may struggle. The proposed research will...

Effective: 2023-2027

Funding Type: ECR:Core

Principal Investigators: Martha W Alibali, Florencia K Anggoro, Benjamin D Jee, Karl S Rosengren

Institutions: University of Wisconsin-Madison, College of the Holy Cross, Worcester State University, University of Rochester

Biodiversity is fundamental to understanding the way biologists study nature. There is much more variability within species than people recognize, and it is this variability that fuels development and change of species in contexts of survival and reproduction. It is important that young children understand this foundational idea. This project will test an innovative approach to promoting comparisons relevant to understanding biological variability. This approach involves modifying two popular...

Effective: 2023-2027

Funding Type: ECR:Core

Principal Investigator: Amy E Booth

Institution: Vanderbilt University

Sociodemographic disparities in science-related opportunities and achievement emerge in early childhood, and likely contribute to long-term engagement and representation in STEM fields. With these realities as a backdrop, this project aims to better understand the origins and development of scientific literacy and interests. Children's experiences at home, their early attunement to cause and effect, and the development of related cognitive skills are being evaluated longitudinally from 3 to 13...

Effective: 2023-2027

Funding Type: ECR:Core

Principal Investigator: Rebecca Campbell-Montalvo

Institution: University of Connecticut

This project follows engineering graduate students, professors, and those in industry to learn about their experiences when it comes to the climate they face in engineering and the factors that relate to their persistence. Specially, this research involves multiple explanatory angles to understand persistence, including the knowledge and beliefs engineers have, the people whom they go to for advice and resources, and the climate they experience in engineering. This advances scientific knowledge...

Effective: 2023-2026

Funding Type: Mid-Career Advancement (MCA)

Principal Investigator: Kingsley A Reeves Jr

Institution: University of South Florida

The goal of the Mid-Career Advancement program is to substantively enhance and advance the research program of mid-career scientists and engineers through synergistic and mutually beneficial partnerships, typically at an institution other than their home institution. The resources provided by the collaborator of this project will provide the principal investigator (PI) with both the opportunity to work with a team of individuals actively engaged in learning analytics research as well as access...

Effective: 2023-2026

Funding Type: ECR:Core

Principal Investigators: Jaclyn Ocumpaugh, Luc Paquette

Institutions: University of Pennsylvania, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

The integration of digital games into STEM education has been an active area of research for quite some time, but details about how students' interactions with educational games may or may not reflect their interest is more difficult to obtain. This project will use a Minecraft-based simulation environment to advance understanding of how educational digital games can support the development of enduring STEM interest. Middle school students in summer and afterschool camps will experiment with a...

Effective: 2023-2026

Funding Type: BCSER IID

Principal Investigator: John Hu

Institution: Oklahoma State University

This project serves the national interest of semiconductor workforce development by understanding how to teach circuit debugging in undergraduate courses. As the transistor count and complexity of today’s chips grow, thanks to Moore’s Law, fewer new chips can work perfectly for the first time. Hence, a high level of engineering effort is put into debugging, a process that identifies and fixes any discrepancies between the expected and measured chip behavior. This project seeks to explore...

Effective: 2023-2026

Funding Type: BCSER Institute

Principal Investigators: Ryan Baker, Shaun B Kellogg

Institutions: University of Pennsylvania, North Carolina State University

Learning Analytics (LA) has emerged over the past 15 years as an interdisciplinary practice that applies computational methods from data science and artificial intelligence (AI) to better understand and improve student learning. However, professional development and training opportunities -- particularly for scholars from underrepresented groups -- have not kept pace with the growing demand for STEM education researchers prepared to use these methods. To address this issue, the Institute on...

Effective: 2023-2026

Funding Type: BCSER IID

Principal Investigator: Dayoung Kim

Institution: Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University

Despite the emphasis on both entrepreneurship and social responsibility for engineering students, education, and research on the two topics have been mostly separate efforts. Technology-based social entrepreneurship education for engineers has ample potential to give engineering students the opportunity to become socially responsible engineering leaders with an entrepreneurial mindset. However, very little research on the topic has been conducted in the field of engineering education. This...

Effective: 2023-2026

Funding Type: BCSER IID

Principal Investigator: Angela N Google

Institution: University of Rhode Island

Given the national need for a compositionally diverse and culturally competent workforce in the field of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM), higher education has begun to recognize that cultural norms must change to create a welcoming environment for all in STEM fields. This project aims to create greater understanding of how to broaden participation in biology, chemistry, and physics by (1) examining how graduate students with more than one potentially stigmatizing...

Effective: 2023-2026

Funding Type: ECR:Core

Principal Investigator: Joya Misra

Institution: University of Massachusetts Amherst

STEM higher education leaders play transformational roles for both faculty and students, yet we know too little about how to recruit and retain effective STEM leaders. What factors encourage STEM faculty to move into leadership? What challenges do STEM leaders face in pursuing leadership opportunities? How do opportunities and challenges differ by higher education context, region and location, or leader demographics? The goal of this project is to identify the structural barriers to, as well as...

Effective: 2023-2026

Funding Type: BCSER IID

Principal Investigator: Nicole Panorkou

Institution: Montclair State University

This project uses technology as both a pedagogical tool and a democratizing force to expand student access to the mathematics of area measurement and multiplication, and to support meaningful connections between these topics and students' everyday lives. The project builds on prior work with Dynamic Measurement for Area (DYME-A), an approach that engages students in exploring models of area as a dynamic sweep of a line segment over a distance. Prior results suggest that this approach supports...

Effective: 2023-2026

Funding Type: ECR:Core

Principal Investigator: Vanessa LoBue

Institution: Rutgers University Newark

The goal of this project is to create and test the effectiveness of a storybook intervention that focuses on increasing young children's biological knowledge of illness and contagion. The study focuses on the topic of contagion for several reasons. First, research has shown that in the absence of any explicit instruction or training in the domain of illness transmission, naive and often incorrect theories are often formed, which are difficult to remedy later. In fact, there is evidence that...

Effective: 2023-2026

Funding Type: BCSER IID

Principal Investigator: Xinyu Zhang

Institution: West Virginia University Research Corporation

Baccalaureate Engineering student Success and Transition (BEST) programs are holistic student success programs at four-year undergraduate universities that provide evidence-based, well-structured activities to enhance engineering students' academic and professional success in the college transition and to increase their retention in the engineering major. These programs often struggle to attract diverse students, including women, students from underrepresented minority groups, first-generation...

Effective: 2023-2026

Funding Type: ECR:Core

Principal Investigators: Joshua A Danish, Ravit Golan Duncan

Institutions: Indiana University, Rutgers University New Brunswick

The goal of this project is to study how secondary students come to understand better an underlying logic of natural sciences--the relation between construction of new ideas and critique of them. Science education has traditionally focused mostly on how students construct models of natural phenomena. However, critique is crucial for iterative refinement of models because in professional science, peer critique of explanatory models motivates and guides progress toward better understanding. This...

Effective: 2023-2026

Funding Type: BCSER IID

Principal Investigator: Stephanie M Halmo

Institution: University of Georgia Research Foundation Inc

This project aims to serve the national interest by enhancing science learning and collaboration for undergraduate students in biology and biochemistry. The Nation’s ability to stay on the leading edge of scientific development hinges on a STEM workforce with well-developed collaboration skills. Some evidence suggests that successful collaboration depends on social metacognition, or the awareness and regulation of another’s thinking. Social metacognition occurs when one person stimulates...

Effective: 2023-2026

Funding Type: BCSER IID

Principal Investigator: Karla Rivera Caceres

Institution: Florida International University

Increasingly, STEM educators seek alternatives to traditional grading strategies out of a concern that traditional ways of evaluating student work can undermine meaningful learning. For example, when professors assign points to assignments, students’ goals shift to achieving a high score instead of learning the content and skills provided in the course. Furthermore, grading has also been linked consistently with lower internal motivation, increased anxiety, and decreased self-awareness about...

Effective: 2023-2026

Funding Type: ECR:Core

Principal Investigators: Joseph R Cimpian, Cheryl G Moran, Michelle Perry

Institutions: New York University, University of Chicago, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Elementary mathematics teachers have a growing need for professional learning opportunities. Online resources can provide essential support, especially for teachers from low-resourced schools, in which there is often limited funding for professional development. Online professional learning also allows teachers to work at their own pace and seek out the resources they find most useful. In this project, the investigators will explore different ways that elementary school teachers participate in...

Effective: 2023-2026

Funding Type: ECR:Core

Principal Investigator: Ryan Williams

Institution: American Institutes for Research in the Behavioral Sciences

This research synthesis study reviews the effects of professional learning interventions and will advance STEM educators' understanding of the critically important relationships among teacher professional learning (PL), teacher knowledge and practice, and average student effects. Understanding these relationships will allow the field to design better PL experiences for teachers that truly benefit student learning. The project leverages the availability of causal impact studies in the primary...