Community Roles for Supporting Emerging Education Researchers

Abstract

DBER attracts many faculty from other STEM disciplines, and these faculty have little or no specific training in DBER. DBER requires a mastery of quantitative, qualitative, and/or mixed methodologies, and also a nuanced understanding of breadth of topic, research questions, and theoretical frameworks. This interdisciplinarity is particularly challenging for emerging DBER researchers who often switch into DBER with only discipline specific content and research training. As part of a large study about how STEM faculty become involved with DBER, we interviewed a number of emerging DBER faculty about their pathways into DBER. We conducted a thematic analysis of these interviews grounded in the theoretical frameworks of the reasoned action approach and conjecture mapping. Based on our analysis we identified 3 roles that support new faculty entering DBER. These roles are the peer, the subject matter expert, and the project manager.

The use of frameworks in chemistry education research

“…In addition, DBER often involves incorporating a guiding framework, which may be theoretical in nature, as part of the research process. Despite the use of theoretical frameworks being a norm within education research communities, prior work in the context of the mathematics education research community indicates that using theoretical frameworks poses challenges for emerging education researchers (Haas et al, 2022). This is likely a challenge shared across DBER communities, given the common critique across DBER fields that theoretical frameworks are inconsistently used and that studies are often undertheorized (Lohmann and Froyd, 2010;Reinholz and Andrews, 2019;Bussey et al, 2020;Bakker et al, 2021).…”

A Professional Development Program for Emerging STEM Education Researchers

“…Our research shows that professional development for faculty cannot just focus on particular skills development but needs to fully incorporate community building for an opportunity to find connections and partnerships with various members in the DBER community [19]. Our research also highlights how important it is to attend explicitly to the needs of each participant.…”

“…Our research on the types of community that members needed to support their transition highlights the importance of having supportive peers, engaged subject matter experts, and effective project managers in emerging scholars' research endeavors to increase their sense of belonging in the field [19]. Our research also explored how challenging it is for new scholars in education researchers to conceptualize theory and navigate how it is used in education research.…”