Breaking the Boundaries of Collaboration in STEM Education Research

Loyola Marymount University, Los Angeles CA

Investigators

Abstract

Recent decades have seen increasing attention to and progress in research in undergraduate science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) education, making it time to initiate a STEM-wide and STEM-focused researcher network. The Breaking the Boundaries in STEM Education Conference will bring together scholars in discipline-based education research (DBER) and in the scholarship of teaching and learning (SoTL) to create a hub that will enable these researchers to learn from and collaborate with each other. The project will expand on successful efforts undertaken by the Collaborative Research on Evaluating, Advancing, and Transforming Education in STEM (CREATE-STEM) group at Loyola Marymount University. This conference will be precedent-setting and will offer a model that has the potential to be scalable. Two main research questions guide the overall scope of the conference: (1) What are the common threads across disciplines to approach the teaching and learning of quantitative skills that are relevant in STEM? (2) What are the challenges and barriers that need to be overcome in order to foster collaboration across disciplines to impact the teaching and learning of quantitative skills relevant in STEM? The inaugural conference will be organized around three themes: equity, problem solving, and computational thinking. The project will result in a conference proceedings and relevant peer-reviewed archival publications.