ECR Projects

Explore past and current fundamental STEM education research projects across the three research areas that NSF's EDU Core Research (ECR) program funds, as well as across ECR funding types. Other search filters draw from both NSF's data and the ECR Hub's hand coding of award abstracts.

Ninth-grade biology students create cell models using clay.

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STEM Workforce Development STEM Workforce Development  STEM Learning and Learning Environments STEM Learning and Learning Environments  
Broadening Participation in STEM Broadening Participation in STEM

Understanding and Removing Faculty Barriers for the Adoption and Implementation of Proven Interventions

Effective Years: 2018-2024

This study will investigate the factors that facilitate or hinder STEM undergraduate instructors from implementing strategies that have demonstrably positive impacts on student outcomes. The research will specifically focus on the study of one such intervention called the Utility Value Intervention (UVI), which has been shown to have a positive impact especially on students who are first generation college students or who are from racial and ethnic minority groups that are underrepresented in STEM fields. The UVI helps students to discover connections between science topics and their lives, and to make connections between STEM topics they are studying and their goals. Making these connections helps students appreciate the value of the work, leading to a deeper engagement and involvement which, in turn, enhances career motivation and performance. The proposed research focuses on understanding why faculty decide to adopt intervention strategies such as the UVI or not.

The study is framed by organizational theories of diversity resistance and social psychological theories of decision making. The project team will collect data from over 800 undergraduate biology instructors from a nationally representative sample. This will be complemented by interviews with 40 introductory biology instructors and field experiments with 624 biology instructors to understand attitudes toward adopting or resisting diversity-focused interventions. In later years of the project, the investigators will conduct a randomized controlled trial testing the optimized intervention delivery methods with a new nationally representative sample of 200 biology instructors. This project is supported by the Education and Human Resources Core Research Program, which funds fundamental research in STEM learning and learning environments, broadening participation in STEM, and STEM 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.