Effective: 2020-2025

Funding Type: CAREER

Principal Investigator: Daniel L Reinholz

Institution: San Diego State University Foundation

This project will study how data visualizations may help university faculty recognize their implicit biases and promote equitable participation in their classrooms. Participation is a key part of learning, but implicit biases can result in different opportunities for different groups of students to participate in STEM classrooms. Such differences can cause inequities in learning outcomes that may lead to underrepresentation of women, students of color, and other groups in the STEM workforce. By...

Effective: 2020-2025

Funding Type: CAREER

Principal Investigator: Marijel C Melo

Institution: University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Makerspaces are places for hands on application of STEM concepts and skills. They are stocked with high-tech tools, supplies, and equipment, such as 3D printers, to support collaborative, creative work to build things. Given their potential to support STEM learning, makerspaces are increasingly integrated into universities across the country. However, if observers watched to see who decides to take advantage of a makerspace, they would see many students stick their heads in the door, look...

Effective: 2020-2025

Funding Type: CAREER

Principal Investigator: Jacqueline M Chen

Institutions: University of Utah, University of Connecticut

The Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) program is a National Science Foundation-wide activity that offers awards in support of junior faculty who exemplify the role of teacher-scholars through outstanding research, excellent education, and the integration of education and research within the context of the mission of their organizations. This project awarded to a CAREER scholar has the goal to increase our understanding of effective faculty mentoring and its connection to STEM graduate...

Effective: 2020-2025

Funding Type: ECR:Core

Principal Investigators: David F Feldon, Jason Owen-Smith

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

The study will assess the skills held by individuals at the time of PhD attainment and the measurable impacts that such skills may have on individual career trajectory. Investigators will conduct a longitudinal study that links individual-level data, academic program data, professional attainment data, and employer profile data. These data will enable an empirical assessment of the role that communication, leadership, and management skills play in shaping the career trajectories of PhD...

Effective: 2020-2025

Funding Type: ECR:Core

Principal Investigators: Andrei Cimpian, Brian Donovan, Catherine Riegle-Crumb

Institutions: New York University, BSCS Science Learning, University of Texas at Austin

Recent research suggests that learning about genetics during high school biology can lead to a belief that inherent differences in the genes and brains of men and women are the main causes of gender differences in behavior and intellectual abilities (a belief known as neurogenetic essentialism). This belief is implicated in lowering girls’ sense of their own STEM abilities, their feelings of belonging in STEM classes, and their interest in pursuing further education in STEM fields. The goal...

Effective: 2020-2025

Funding Type: ECR:Core

Principal Investigators: Lisa Y Flores, Rachel L Navarro

Institutions: University of Missouri-Columbia, University of North Dakota Main Campus

Slow progress has been made over the past several years to broaden the involvement of groups who are underrepresented in engineering disciplines. The number of Latinxs in particular continues to decrease at each transition point along the pathway to becoming a practicing engineer (i.e., declaring a engineering major, graduating with an engineering degree, working in the engineering field). Increased efforts across the engineering ecosystem, but specifically during the college-to-work...

Effective: 2020-2025

Funding Type: ECR:Core

Principal Investigator: Deborah L Ball

Institution: Regents of the University of Michigan - Ann Arbor

Growing evidence about the powerful effects of skillful teaching on students’ learning creates a need for professional development that impacts teachers’ actual practice. Teaching practices have been shown to play a crucial role in the reproduction or disruption of injustice. This project aims to create opportunities for teachers to notice and understand how normalized practice often reproduces inequity and learn ways to disrupt typical patterns of inequity in their classroom. The project...

Effective: 2020-2025

Funding Type: ECR:Core

Principal Investigator: Steven T Piantadosi

Institution: University of California-Berkeley

The project, led by a team of researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, aims to understand the relationship between attention and early mathematical development. Children’s first mathematical skills, like counting and number estimation, are typically measured using tasks that require children to sustain attention. In some cases their knowledge of mathematics is intrinsically linked to attentional processes. For example, in counting, children must learn to attend selectively to...

Effective: 2020-2025

Funding Type: CAREER

Principal Investigator: Michael K Scullin

Institution: Baylor University

The Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) program is a National Science Foundation-wide activity that offers awards in support of junior faculty who exemplify the role of teacher-scholars through outstanding research, excellent education, and the integration of education and research within the context of the mission of their organizations. This award to a scientist at Baylor University has the goal of improving STEM education at the undergraduate level by bridging the gap between...

Effective: 2020-2024

Funding Type: CAREER

Principal Investigator: Joi-Lynn Mondisa

Institution: Regents of the University of Michigan - Ann Arbor

The Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) program is a National Science Foundation-wide activity that offers awards in support of junior faculty who exemplify the role of teacher-scholars through outstanding research, excellent education, and the integration of education and research within the context of the mission of their organizations. This project awarded to a CAREER scholar has the goal to discover and understand effective, evidence-based mentoring practices and strategies that...

Effective: 2020-2024

Funding Type: ECR:Core

Principal Investigator: Ira Caspari-Gnann

Institution: Tufts University

This project aims to serve the national interest by characterizing the ways in which facilitation practices of instructional assistants contribute to the scientific literacy of students in large enrollment introductory chemistry and physics lectures. In this project, instructional assistants are defined as undergraduate learning assistants and graduate teaching assistants who support student learning during problem solving in interactive lectures. Integrating instructional assistants into...

Effective: 2020-2024

Funding Type: ECR:Core

Principal Investigator: Christopher S Hulleman

Institution: University of Virginia Main Campus

This study addresses gaps in the STEM utility-value interventions literature by studying the interventions in gateway community college math courses, which serve as a critical barrier or opportunity to postsecondary success. Researchers at the University of Virginia and the Tennessee Board of Regents will investigate three research questions: (1) Do customized utility-value interventions lead to improved academic outcomes compared to standard utility-value interventions or a control condition?...

Effective: 2020-2024

Funding Type: ECR:Core

Principal Investigator: Maria Ong

Institution: TERC Inc

Native students and professionals are severely underrepresented in all STEM degree programs and professions in the U.S. This underrepresentation is often overlooked in research and discussions of equity in STEM. This abstract, and this project, uses the word "Native" as an umbrella to refer to American Indians, Alaska Natives, Native Hawaiians, Pacific Islanders, First Nations, and other indigenous peoples of North America. This project will contribute to changing the conversation about Native...

Effective: 2020-2024

Funding Type: ECR:Core

Principal Investigators: Nancy Jordan, Nora S Newcombe

Institutions: University of Delaware, Temple University

Although fractions represent a crucial topic in early childhood education, many students develop only a tenuous grasp of fraction concepts, even after several years of fraction instruction that is aligned with current standards. The goal of this project, led by a team of researchers at the University of Delaware and Temple University, is to answer important questions about the informal understandings of fractions young children have before they come to school and what their relations are to...

Effective: 2020-2023

Funding Type: BCSER IID

Principal Investigator: Ramon Barthelemy

Institution: University of Utah

This project is a ten-year follow up to a pilot study that examined the educational experiences and career goals of 21 women graduate students in physics and astronomy. The previous study results revealed a complex tapestry of experiences with mentoring, gender discrimination, and the development of career goals that influenced the students’ ultimate outcomes. The study showed that many were considering non-academic careers because of their perceptions of work-life balance and the academic...

Effective: 2020-2023

Funding Type: BCSER IID

Principal Investigator: Qi Shi

Institution: Loyola University Maryland, Inc.

This capacity building project includes a study to examine the experiences of Latina English Learners to identify the resources and assets that impact their academic and career development and persistence in STEM. Guided by the culture wealth model and social cognitive career theory, the investigator will conduct a qualitative study using a phenomenology design to understand the meaning of these students’ experiences using three developmental milestones: interest, access, and persistence. The...

Effective: 2020-2023

Funding Type: ECR:Core

Principal Investigator: Zeyu Xu

Institution: American Institutes for Research in the Behavioral Sciences

Socioeconomic and racial gaps in STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) participation can sometimes be traced back to discrepancies in mathematics skills that emerge at kindergarten entry. Importantly, children who exhibit early lags in mathematics development may also demonstrate lower growth rates in mathematics skills later. Consequently, early gaps in mathematics skills may widen over the course of schooling. How to diagnose and correct mathematics shortcomings early is a...

Effective: 2020-2023

Funding Type: ECR:Core

Principal Investigator: Nianbo Dong

Institution: University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

This research project is supported by the EHR Core Research (ECR) program, which supports work that advances fundamental research on STEM learning and learning environments, broadening participation in STEM, and STEM workforce development.There continues to be increasing demand for more comprehensive assessments of the impacts of STEM education programs, policies, and practices. In general, cost-effectiveness studies are designed to address this demand by evaluating the comparative performance...

Effective: 2020-2023

Funding Type: BCSER Institute

Principal Investigators: Ken Frank, Guanglei Hong

Institutions: Michigan State University, University of Chicago

The goals of this capacity building institute are (a) to introduce participants to rigorous and novel applications of advanced methods to STEM education research, (b) to provide them with continuous methodological support in research planning, data analysis, and publication, and (c) to create a community that prepares emerging scholars for taking leadership in advancing STEM education research. This capacity building award initiates an institute in quantitative and computational methods for...

Effective: 2020-2023

Funding Type: ECR:Core

Principal Investigators: Mary D Beisiegel, Irene Duranczyk, Vilma Mesa, Laura L Watkins

Institutions: Oregon State University, University of Minnesota-Twin Cities, Regents of the University of Michigan - Ann Arbor, Maricopa County Community College District

This STEM Learning and Learning Environments project seeks to advance understanding of algebra education at community colleges. It will build on prior work to explore further the relationship between the quality of instruction in college algebra classes and teachers’ mathematical knowledge for teaching. This “knowledge for teaching” is the mathematical understanding that teachers need in order to be effective teachers of mathematics. For example, this knowledge enables teachers to explore...

Effective: 2020-2023

Funding Type: ECR:Core

Principal Investigator: Gladis Kersaint

Institution: University of Connecticut

Despite efforts to broaden their participation in STEM, African Americans continue to be underrepresented in the STEM disciplines. Even after enrolling to major in STEM degrees, African Americans are more likely to switch to non-STEM majors or leave college compared to other ethnic groups. The purpose of this project through the University of Connecticut is to examine the lived experiences of African American engineering undergraduates at three predominately white institutions (PWI). The...

Effective: 2020-2023

Funding Type: BCSER IID

Principal Investigator: Jenny M Dauer

Institution: University of Nebraska-Lincoln

It is essential for citizens to develop the science literacy that empowers them to make informed decisions about challenging real-world issues. Science literacy is a complex process that involves learning to make sense of information from multiple sources, to consider social, cultural and economic values, and to evaluate options for action. To effectively enhance the scientific literacy of their students, science instructors also need to integrate results of psychology research that may help...

Effective: 2020-2023

Funding Type: ECR:Core

Principal Investigator: Sarah L Ferguson

Institution: Rowan University

The project will examine the efficacy of an intervention designed to increase self-efficacy and motivation to pursue STEM careers among rural high school students. Researchers will use a design-based approach to partner with rural school districts tointroduce students to high-need STEM career fields using virtual reality technology and career exploration modules. They will also guide students in assessing their potential fit for these fields. The researchers hypothesize that student career...

Effective: 2020-2023

Funding Type: BCSER IID

Principal Investigator: Jamie Gurganus

Institution: University of Maryland Baltimore County

In this capacity building project, the investigator proposes to develop a model for inquiry in engineering education research that accommodates a range of complementary data types, data sources, points of time, and conceptual lenses while concurrently acquiring skills in explanatory sequential mixed-methods STEM education research. The research project aims to model patterns of major behavior data among undergraduate women entering and exiting an engineering program prior to graduation,...

Effective: 2020-2023

Funding Type: Conference

Principal Investigator: Richard S Moog

Institution: The POGIL Project

This project aims to promote discipline-based education research (DBER) within the Process-oriented Guided Inquiry Learning (POGIL) community of practitioners. Specifically, the project team will host a workshop for early- and mid-career POGIL practitioners led by a team of five DBER scholars. The goal of this event is to introduce current POGIL practitioners to the knowledge and skills involved in design, implementation, and methodology of STEM education research. The participants will be...

Effective: 2020-2023

Funding Type: RAPID/EAGER

Principal Investigators: John D Coley, Deborah Kelemen

Institutions: Northeastern University, Trustees of Boston University

Misconceptions about the transmission of COVID-19 can lead to noncompliance with preventive public health recommendations. The first goal of this project, led by researchers at Boston University and Northeastern University, is to understand the deeper conceptual nature of these biological misconceptions. The research will explore whether these ideas are specific to COVID-19 or whether they reflect intuitive reasoning patterns of reasoning about biological phenomena more generally, and how...

Effective: 2020-2023

Funding Type: BCSER IID

Principal Investigator: Simi T Hoque

Institution: Drexel University

This two-year project will analyze how adolescent girls develop as sustainable citizens as they take part in a college-based STEM summer program that offers hands-on workshops in sustainability science. As a Building Capacity in STEM Educational Research (BCSER) project, a key goal is to build the principal investigator's knowledge base and analytical expertise in STEM education research. This project aims to position the investigator to conduct longer-term research on broadening participation...

Effective: 2020-2023

Funding Type: ECR:Core

Principal Investigators: Xinnian Chen, Mark J Graham

Institutions: University of Connecticut, Yale University

This project aims to serve the national interest by conducting basic research to characterize key components of student trust in college STEM instructors and how that trust contributes to desired student outcomes. The project is an EHR Core Research (ECR) Level 1 award, focused on STEM Learning and Learning Environments. A consensus is emerging about the benefits of student-centered pedagogies, like active learning, for students in college classrooms. However, less is known about how...

Effective: 2020-2023

Funding Type: ECR:Core

Principal Investigators: Joe Dauer, Tammy M Long

Institutions: University of Nebraska-Lincoln, Michigan State University

This project aims to serve the national interest by conducting basic research about the neurobiology of learning in undergraduate life sciences education. This Level 1 STEM learning and learning environments project aims to broaden understanding of who is affected by modeling-based instruction in undergraduate life sciences, and how they are affected. Modeling is vital to STEM professions and national standards call for modeling instruction at all levels of STEM education. Despite behavioral...

Effective: 2020-2023

Funding Type: BCSER IID

Principal Investigator: Maia Popova

Institution: University of North Carolina Greensboro

Representational competence is the ability to use drawings, diagrams, and symbols to learn, communicate, and solve problems in a specific area, such as organic chemistry. Studies have shown that undergraduate students’ ability to reason with specific representations is important for their understanding of and success in organic chemistry. However, no validated assessment instruments currently exist that measure students’ representational competence in organic chemistry. With support from...

Effective: 2020-2023

Funding Type: BCSER IID

Principal Investigator: Julia St Goar

Institution: Merrimack College

This award will support the development of research to investigate key developmental mathematics understandings of undergraduates who are intending to become teachers. Many secondary teachers learned geometry through proving theorems. Current secondary standards and guidelines favor a vastly different approach that focuses on geometric transformations, such as reflection of a shape against an axis. This difference in learning approaches provides an important STEM education question: how do...

Effective: 2020-2023

Funding Type: ECR:Core

Principal Investigators: David A Barner, Roman Feiman

Institutions: University of California-San Diego, Brown University

The concept of exact numerical equality is central to mathematical reasoning, and learning it in early childhood is a strong predictor of later academic success. Unfortunately, it remains a persistent source of difficulty for many students, with implications for the understanding of number words by preschoolers and even the learning of algebra in middle school. The main goal of this project, led by researchers at the University of California, San Diego, and Brown University, is to understand...

Effective: 2020-2023

Funding Type: BCSER Institute

Principal Investigators: Margaret Levenstein, Felice J Levine

Institutions: Regents of the University of Michigan - Ann Arbor, American Educational Research Association

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...

Effective: 2020-2023

Funding Type: ECR:Core

Principal Investigator: Joshua R Polanin

Institution: American Institutes for Research in the Behavioral Sciences

This project aims to serve the national interest by conducting basic research on the effectiveness of a commonly used teaching approach in K-12 STEM education, as well as by providing a tool that can help others do similar research studies. Specifically, the project will study the effectiveness of the 5E (Engagement, Exploration, Explanation, Elaboration, and Evaluation) model for instruction, which is commonly used in K-12 STEM education to organize instruction within programs, units, and...

Effective: 2020-2023

Funding Type: BCSER IID

Principal Investigator: Anne Casper

Institution: Eastern Michigan University

Evaluating Classroom Undergraduate Research Experience Laboratory Benefits for Underprepared StudentsClassroom Undergraduate Research Experience (CURE) laboratory experiences can make science more inclusive by giving large numbers of first-year students the experience of carrying out authentic research. The positive benefits of CUREs include increased analytical skills, technical skills, self-efficacy, and persistence in science. Most of the reported research on CUREs is from research-intensive...

Effective: 2020-2023

Funding Type: ECR:Core

Principal Investigator: Sara Schmitt

Institutions: University of Oregon Eugene, Purdue University

The purpose of this project is to further develop, refine, and evaluate a research-based STEM learning tool (i.e. block play) that tests theories of mathematical learning. Block play is common in preschool settings and is a context in which mathematics skill development may occur. Although a growing body of work has linked block play to mathematical development, there remains little causal evidence to support these relationships. The first objective of the project is to empirically evaluate the...

Effective: 2020-2023

Funding Type: ECR:Core

Principal Investigators: Nigel Bosch, Jaclyn Ocumpaugh

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

Students in middle school and high school often use adaptive learning software as part of their math education experience. Adaptive learning software works by automatically measuring how much students have learned about the topic, as well as their learning process and experiences, and then adjusting the instruction accordingly. This project will investigate potential ways in which adaptive learning software might be biased against students from certain groups, and how such biases can be...

Effective: 2020-2023

Funding Type: ECR:Core

Principal Investigators: Logan Fiorella, Allison J Jaeger

Institutions: University of Georgia Research Foundation Inc, Saint John's University

Academic success depends on students’ ability to comprehend text. Such comprehension can be challenging in undergraduate science courses because the text often describes things that are complex, dynamic, and invisible. One critical factor in effective text comprehension is the ability to monitor and regulate one’s own learning. Unfortunately, students are often inaccurate judges of their learning, leading them to make ineffective study choices and to achieve limited learning outcomes. This...

Effective: 2020-2023

Funding Type: ECR:Core

Principal Investigators: Paul Dawkins, Kyeong Hah Roh

Institutions: Texas State University - San Marcos, Arizona State University

This project will build upon promising teaching experiments that have already been conducted to develop theory about how students develop understandings of logical structure when learning mathematical proof. The project will begin with an initial model of students' Reflection and Abstraction of Proof Structures based on findings from existing studies and will develop and extend this model through a series of new teaching experiments. In the third year of the project, the model will be used to...

Effective: 2020-2023

Funding Type: ECR:Core

Principal Investigator: Edward C Fletcher Jr

Institution: Ohio State University

Research about broadening participation in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) is a significant priority for the National Science Foundation (NSF). Compared to their White male counterparts, African American males are commonly underrepresented in STEM. With increasing American workforce needs in STEM, more research is needed that focuses on broadening participation in STEM among historically underrepresented populations, including African American males. Much of the current...

Effective: 2020-2023

Funding Type: ECR:Core

Principal Investigator: Miray Tekkumru Kisa

Institution: Florida State University

Videos of teaching have become a popular tool for facilitating teacher learning, with the potential to powerfully impact teacher practice. However, less is known about specific mechanisms through which teachers learn from video. The goal of this study is to build foundational knowledge about teacher learning by using video clips of science instruction within a professional development (PD) context. The researchers will study the infusion of principles from cognitive science as possible ways to...

Effective: 2020-2023

Funding Type: ECR:Core

Principal Investigator: Ravit Golan Duncan

Institution: Rutgers University New Brunswick

Currently, equity remains an elusive goal in science education. Many minority groups continue to be underrepresented in science careers, limiting their opportunities to pursue potential science trajectories and diminishing benefits to society from diverse perspectives. Science learning environments, however, often do not build on or recognize the lives of students resulting in persistent marginalization. This, in turn, can lead minoritized youth to identify negatively with science and decreases...

Effective: 2020-2023

Funding Type: ECR:Core

Principal Investigator: Andrea L Beach

Institution: Western Michigan University

To improve science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) outcomes in K-12 classrooms, it is critical to understand the landscape of the STEM learning environment. However, the STEM learning environment is complex. Students are nested within teachers, and teachers are nested within schools (which in turn are nested within districts), which implies a multilevel structure. To date, most empirical research that uses multilevel modeling to examine the role of higher levels on variation in...

Effective: 2020-2023

Funding Type: BCSER IID

Principal Investigator: Nadia M Mills

Institution: University of The Virgin Islands

This project aims to serve the national interest by increasing undergraduate student success in STEM courses. It will do so by improving implementation of Peer-Led Team Learning (PLTL) and implementing research to examine the effectiveness of these improvements. This project focuses on the effects of PLTL in early mathematics courses. When PLTL was implemented in a remedial mathematics course at the University of the Virgin Islands, students were able to complete the course successfully....

Effective: 2020-2023

Funding Type: ECR:Core

Principal Investigator: Liza J Weinstein

Institution: Northeastern University

Northeastern University will implement an NSF EHR Core Research (ECR) project that uses a multi-method social network analysis to better understand the evolution, operation, and outcomes of a network of grantees from the NSF-funded ADVANCE program. The NSF ADVANCE program has made awards since 2001 to promote systemic change that supports gender equity of the academic science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) workforce. A consequence of the program has been the emergence of a nationwide...

Effective: 2020-2023

Funding Type: BCSER Institute

Principal Investigator: Maria Ong

Institution: TERC Inc

TERC, Inc. will implement an Institute in Research Methods that will build capacity in qualitative meta-synthesis methods, with an emphasis on STEM equity and inclusion literature. The institute responds to the need for greater emphasis on meta-synthesis methods in STEM education research, the lack of preparation among researchers to conduct these studies, and the need to diversify the pool of STEM education researchers broadly. Institute participants are expected to build capacity in...

Effective: 2020-2023

Funding Type: BCSER Institute

Principal Investigators: Scott V Franklin, Mary Bridget Kustusch, Eugene Y Vasserman

Institutions: Rochester Institute of Tech, DePaul University, Kansas State University

This Institute in Research Methods project extends the impact of the Professional Development for Emerging Education Researchers (PEER) field school model to emerging education researchers through a multi-faceted approach, building individual and community capacity for high-quality STEM education research. The institute advances understanding of the effectiveness of professional development for research. Evaluation activities will identify characteristics of successful field schools in STEM...

Effective: 2020-2023

Funding Type: ECR:Core

Principal Investigator: Gena Nelson

Institution: Boise State University

This project is designed to explore how adults, including parents and childcare providers, can help children better learn mathematics in informal settings. To do so, this research study will conduct a meta-analysis of mathematics teaching strategies used in informal learning environments, such as museums, libraries, and the home. A meta-analysis examines published research data, paying close attention to differences in findings, and uses statistics to analyze the findings across different...

Effective: 2020-2023

Funding Type: ECR:Core

Principal Investigators: David Hammer, Natasha G Holmes, Rachel E Scherr

Institutions: Tufts University, Cornell University, University of Washington

This project aims to serve the national interest by identifying strategies to support students’ understanding of experimental science. The major goal is to identify instructional strategies that better prepare undergraduate students for doing authentic scientific experimentation in physics labs. Traditional laboratory exercises have trained students to view instructional laboratories as places to do rote procedures that lead to known results. This project will probe how to help students...

Effective: 2020-2023

Funding Type: ECR:Core

Principal Investigator: Robin F Schumacher

Institution: RG Research Group

When students explain their solution approaches in mathematics, they are able to make linkages with prior knowledge, build new insights, and deepen their understanding of the mathematics they are learning. Students with mathematics difficulties (those performing below the 25th percentile) struggle to articulate their understanding of mathematical principles as they explain their solution approaches. Learning and understanding fractions in upper elementary school is especially challenging for...