This project is comprised of two workshops involving national leaders with the goal of advancing the national infrastructure supporting STEM education research, including cross-disciplinary research, in higher education. These workshops are called: Workshops on Infrastructure for STEM Education Research (WISER). A focus of the WISER workshops is how best to develop a broad consortium administering a Database for the Assessment of National STEM Education Research (DANSER). DANSER is being designed to be part of the core infrastructure needed to support the research culture envisioned by national leaders in STEM education.
Intellectual Merit: Through CCLI and other extramural support programs, many teaching innovations have been developed and piloted. However, much work remains to be done to scientifically evaluate these interventions under controlled experimental conditions to establish their impact on student learning or attitudes and their portability to other institutions and populations. A key barrier to such scientific investigations is the lack of common regularly applied instruments used for evaluation and assessment, the lack of national consortia of institutions to draw on to ensure the quality of the conduct of experimental trials, and other elements of a research infrastructure that are taken for granted in some fields.
Broader Impacts: The DANSER System under development at Ohio State University is a resource of potential high value once it has reached a critical stage of completion. Instructors would be able to compare their students? learning and attitudes to national norms and more readily evaluate how changes they make in their pedagogy affect student outcomes. STEM education researchers can draw on a consortium of institutions, already gathering consistent base-line data, to evaluate new ideas while instrument authors collaborating with this consortium will be able to substantially reduce development time and thus allow for a greater breadth of concepts to be measured.
