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.

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STEM Learning and Learning Environments STEM Learning and Learning Environments  Broadening Participation in STEM Broadening Participation in STEM

Building Quantitative Capacity in Contextualized STEM Education Research

Effective Years: 2019-2024

The primary goal of the ECR: BCSER Individual Investigator Development (IID) in STEM education research is to facilitate the acquisition of education research expertise to enable an investigator to successfully conceive and execute fundamental research with the potential to meaningfully advance current knowledge in one of ECR's research domains - learning and learning environments, broadening participation, and workforce development. This project, titled "Building Quantitative Capacity in Contextualized STEM Education Research", focuses on synthesizing, through systematic analysis, the existing body of knowledge on STEM contextualization and its influence on STEM learning. The project has two distinct aims: 1) to conduct a multi-faceted literature review to identify factors that impact the relationship between contextualization and STEM learning, and 2) to prepare the PI to lead this study through the realization of a focused professional development plan that relies on mentorship and participation in workshops and coursework. Findings from the study could have positive impacts on STEM teaching and learning, curriculum development, teacher preparation, future research trajectories, and broadening participation in STEM.

The project's research approach consists of a review of existing literature on contextualized STEM learning, including a bibliometric network review to identify families of antecedent theory, a systematic landscape analysis of qualitative and quantitative work in the field, and a meta-analysis to compare effect sizes of contextualization interventions that were quantitatively evaluated. Ongoing mentorship from three accomplished science education researchers as well as work with a faculty research cohort serve to prepare the PI with the skills and knowledge to implement the study. The completion of online courses, participation in research retreats, and engagement in a series of workshops on topics relevant to the study (including bibliometrics, network analysis, meta-analysis, and R programming), also play substantive roles in building the PI's research capacity. Two graduate students are supported by the project, contributing to the research and their own growth as researchers through data collection, management, and analysis. Evaluation of the project's progress on its two aims is conducted regularly by the project's mentors, providing practical feedback for optimizing the project's activities and outcomes. Along with developing the PI's research capacity, significant intellectual merit lies in the project's potential to generate actionable information on the cluster of contextualization research, their antecedent theoretical perspectives, patterns on how contextualization has been operationalized, and meta-analytic patterns in how, to what degree, and for whom contextualization can improve STEM learning. Broader impacts are anticipated through the application of findings to increase the participation of underrepresented groups in STEM. The study's findings will be disseminated through publications in peer-reviewed journals and presentations at professional meetings. The project is supported through the EHR Core Research: Building Capacity in STEM Education Research (ECR: BCSER) competition that is designed to build individuals' capacity to carry out high quality fundamental STEM education research in STEM learning and learning environments, broadening participation in STEM fields, 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.