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.

Home > ECR Projects Search > Project Detail
STEM Workforce Development STEM Workforce Development  

ECR Data Resource Hub: Partnership for Expanding Education Research in STEM (PEERS)

Effective Years: 2020-2024

The Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR) at the University of Michigan and the American Education Research Association (AERA) propose to create an ECR Data Resource Hub, Partnership for Expanding Education Research in STEM (PEERS). The goal is to connect, educate, and build community around relevant forms of data and offer professional development focused on data skills, tools, and resources. PEERS will connect researchers to repositories and data sources as well as to materials on data sharing and learning tools for analyzing data to foster research transparency and reproducibility. PEERS will engage with producers or custodians of novel data, including administrative, video capture, streaming, and other non-designed data. PEERS also will engage data scientists in developing new approaches for discovering, accessing, and analyzing such designed and non-designed data to support their use for STEM education research, and it will work with librarians who are expert in the use of new technologies to catalogue and create user-friendly finding aids. PEERS will enhance research to advance new knowledge and address issues related to policy and practice in STEM education and learning. It will broaden and diversify the community of STEM education research scholars and facilitate a faster translation of research results into new research and practice.

The investigators propose to 1) coordinate with existing data repositories and data providers to help researchers locate and leverage existing data collections; 2) identify and support methodological and substantive innovations, including improving access to and best practices in using non-designed data and linking designed and non-designed data; 3) foster a culture of research transparency and cumulative knowledge; 4) build community among researchers and data providers; and 5) conduct targeted outreach to STEM education researchers. ICPSR and AERA will highlight extant data sources to encourage secondary analysis of existing data and build a single point of discovery for researchers. They will increase the discoverability of providers’ data through sharing of metadata and adoption of practices that increase dataset discovery. In addition, the PEERS website will provide descriptions of other key datasets with links and instructions for accessing the data. To address the barriers associated with multimedia and other big data, PEERS will preserve and provide access to content created from these resources and encourage research to automate content created from these resources. To support replication, reproducibility, and cumulative knowledge building in STEM education research, PEERS will encourage scholars to use the Registry of Efficacy and Effectiveness Studies and other mechanisms and set up a repository of data and date-related products for replication studies and further analyses related to STEM education research using ICPSR’s self-publishing archive infrastructure, OpenICPSR. PEERS will create and share guidelines for transparency that supplement the AERA’s Standards for Reporting on Empirical Social Science Research in AERA publications.

This project is funded through the EHR Core Research (ECR): Building Capacity in STEM Education Research competition that is designed to build capacity to carry out high quality STEM education research that will enhance the nation’s STEM education enterprise.

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.