Discipline-based education research - theory and practice
Ph.D. -course
- ECTS credits
- 5
- Teaching semesters Spring
- Course code
- NT920
- Number of semesters
- 1
- Teaching language
- English
- Resources
- Schedule
Course description
Objectives and Content
Discipline-based education research investigates learning and teaching from a perspective that reflects a discipline’s priorities, worldview, knowledge, and practices. The aim of this course is to introduce students to the topics, literature, and methods of discipline-based education research.
This is a two-week intensive course, with follow-up remote work. Goals are to:
- Introduce students to DBER, and clarify its positioning relative to traditional education research and SoTL
- Familiarize ourselves with broad topics in DBER, through samples from the literature
- Discuss current trends in DBER
- Conduct a course-based research project, with a publishable deliverable, in DBER
We will meet 2-13 February in person, and then have 4 follow-up meetings between 1 March and 15 May.
Learning Outcomes
By the end of the course, students will be able to:
- Describe the development and goals of discipline-based education research in post-secondary institutions
- Consider issues of ethics for working with human subjects in higher education research
- Draw conclusions from fundamental results about how people learn and barriers students face in undergraduate STEM
- Use results from research to design and evaluate classroom activities
- Discuss methods of studying learning including interpreting qualitative results, research-based assessments, and observations
- Evaluate the mechanisms and issues for encouraging adoption of research-based teaching methods at universities
- Conduct projects related to discipline-based education research (DBER), specifically education research done in the context of undergraduate biology, chemistry, physics, math, and geosciences.
Teaching and learning methods
Throughout the course, students will engage in a number of in-class and out-of-class activities, including:
Reading education research articles and leading and participating in discussion of the readings
Students will be assigned a number of readings, which they will be expected to be prepared to discuss in class. Each student will be responsible for leading discussions about an assigned reading. Students are strongly encouraged to apply lessons from this course when facilitating in-class discussion.
Leading class discussions
Students will present and briefly summarize a paper from the primary literature that is being discussed. Summary presentations will be at least 15 minutes and students are encouraged to use powerpoint slides to help with presentations. Then students will lead the class in a discussion of the paper and the topic.
Collecting and analyzing education research data, contributing to a manuscript
Throughout the course, students will collect and analyze data related to education research activities. These may include using a classroom observation protocol, coding qualitative research, or assessing research- validated multiple-choice assessment item. While a literature review on one element of our final project will be submitted separately, we will work collaboratively on the final manuscript.