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 Learning and Learning Environments STEM Learning and Learning Environments  

Active Assessment Supported By Communities of Practice in Mathematics

Effective Years: 2023-2025

This project aims to serve the national interest by contributing to the understanding of experiences of students and instructors of assessment strategies aligned with active learning methods. Towards this goal the project will seek to incorporate the student voice into professional development experiences for collegiate mathematics instructors. In particular, this project will focus on assessment strategies that are aligned with the values and practices of active learning. The community of practice model for supporting instructors in implementing active learning strategies has successfully impacted student learning outcomes. This project will extend that work to examine perceptions and impacts of active assessment. Much of previous literature around assessment has isolated either instructor or student perspectives, but this project will integrate student and instructor perspectives to build a more holistic picture of the impacts of active assessment, and improve faculty assessment practices by considering their impact on students.

This capacity building project will use mixed methods in mathematics education research to contribute to the body of knowledge around assessment practices, integrating student and instructor perspectives, and college mathematics instructor professional development. The research will center the experiences of students from groups that have been historically excluded from mathematics education. It will build knowledge in student experience through qualitative methods that consider the intersection of identities. The project will bring student perspectives into a direct feedback loop for instructors in active assessment communities of practice, scaffolding instructors to adjust practices in ways that are responsive to what is and is not working for students. Additionally, the project will build our nation’s capacity for high-quality STEM education research and practice through faculty training. The project is supported by NSF's EHR Core Research Building Capacity in STEM Education Research (ECR: BCSER) program, which is designed to build investigators’ capacity to carry out high-quality STEM education research.

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.