REU Site: Collaborations in Discipline-Based Education Research: An Interdisciplinary Research Experience in Undergraduate STEM Education

North Dakota State University Fargo, Fargo ND

Investigators

Abstract

This REU Site award to North Dakota State University (NDSU), located in Fargo, North Dakota, will support the training of ten students for ten weeks during the summers of 2025-2027. Students will be engaged in undergraduate research in the area of discipline-based education research (DBER) in an environment that emphasizes the importance of collaborative research practices. This project includes a professional development series designed to focus on career development, DBER methodologies, and science communication. Through mentoring, authentic research experiences, professional development seminars, and social activities, this project fosters interdisciplinary research and aims to encourage talented students to pursue graduate programs. This project will help students build a broad skill set appropriate for a variety of career paths and facilitate the retention of students as DBER scholars. This project also highlights to students how research is used to inform teaching practices, with dissemination of students' research findings contributing to our understanding of effective teaching and learning in STEM. Recruitment activities involve maintaining an active website, social networking, targeted emailing regionally and nationally, and partnering with NDSU offices to disseminate the availability of the REU program. Applications will consider material from the applicant, interviews, and research team objectives to build the REU cohorts. Project evaluation involves a mix of qualitative and quantitative measures that will be collected from students and mentors throughout the summer, which provides the opportunity to obtain both formative and summative feedback when assessing goals. Students will be tracked after the program in order to determine student career paths. Students will be asked to respond to an automatic email sent via the NSF reporting system. More information is available by visiting https://www.ndsu.edu/dber/reu_program/. This project is funded by NSF's Improving Undergraduate STEM Education program, which supports research and development projects to improve the effectiveness of STEM education for all students. 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.