The project will train and support diverse education and social science researchers to develop the skills necessary to effectively use large scale, privacy-protected administrative data to analyze core questions pertaining to STEM education. The goals are to provide technical training, methodological training, technical support for research project development, and community building for participants. The capacity building efforts leverage a successful research infrastructure, accessible data, and well-established history of innovative training to improve the technical and analytic readiness of diverse researchers. While the primary focus will be on the use of linked university research and education data in concert with public workforce information, the skills that learners will acquire will be broadly applicable to many large-scale data analysis projects. Systematic efforts will be made to connect training opportunities to the cultivation of research community, sustained proposal development efforts, and mechanisms that allow both to influence the growth of infrastructure and interdisciplinary capacity of STEM education researchers.
The institute will conduct two annual sets of training activities anchored by multi-day workshops hosted at the University of Michigan Institute for Social Research (ISR). ISR is the institutional home of the Institutes for Research on Innovation and Science (IRIS) and of the Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR). The institute will target 150-165 diverse researchers from less research-intensive and minority-serving institutions. The project team will integrate the proposed capacity building activities with ICPSR summer institute curricula and community building activities while structuring these to align with deadlines for multiple external funding opportunities. The primary data for the course will come from the Universities Measuring the Effects of Research on Innovation, Competitiveness and Science (UMETRICS) dataset, augmented by data on all enrolled students for a subset of participating campuses. These datasets will be integrated with public-use workforce data such as the Bureau of Labor Statistics Quarterly Census of Employments Statistics data and Post-Secondary Employment Outcomes project. Together, these data and associated training materials will provide participants with new tools and opportunities that offer additional avenues to develop research questions that build on their research interests. In addition to building capacity in STEM education research, the project also addresses core components of NSF's Harnessing the Data Revolution Big Idea by expanding access to tools and technologies to a research community.
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.
