Towards the STEM DBER Alliance: why we need a discipline-based STEM education research community

(1)What is DBER? Discipline-based education research (DBER) is a term that has emerged in the last few decades to describe research that “investigates learning and teaching in a discipline using a range of methods with deep grounding in the discipline’s priorities, worldview, knowledge, and practices. It is informed by and complementary to more general research on human learning and cognition” (National Research Council [NRC], 2012, p. 9). DBER seeks to develop evidence-based knowledge and practices that improve teaching and learning in the science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) disciplines. While new knowledge developed within DBER has led to meaningful improvements in student learning and participation in STEM disciplines (NRC, 2012; Singer & Smith, 2013), there remain significant opportunities for additional advances (Snow & Dibner, 2016). DBER represents a collection of fields that sit at the intersection of a STEM discipline and education research. Although one could imagine DBER occurring within any discipline, the term has so far been used only to describe this type of work within STEM disciplines. An important feature of DBER is the strong role that the discipline plays in setting the priorities for the research and in making sure it is relevant and focused on improving what is most important in moving undergraduates towards expertise in the discipline. Each discipline has bodies of disciplinary content, a culture that shapes how members of the discipline think about and approach their work, and established research methods and tools that practitioners use. Each DBER field combines these discipline-based perspectives with theoretical frameworks and research methodologies from education research (Lohmann & Froyd, 2011). Figure 1 shows that the field of engineering education research exists at the intersection of the disciplines of engineering and education research. One result of this intersection, for example, is that engineering education researchers frequently make use of qualitative and mixed methods research methodologies that are more common in education research than in traditional engineering fields. The National Academies’ DBER report (NRC, 2012) helped legitimize DBER work within individual STEM disciplines and bring the term DBER into common usage (Rasmussen & Wawro, in press). Within individual STEM disciplines, “recognition of DBER can be seen in statements by professional societies, the establishment of journals, and the emergence of graduate and postdoctoral opportunities” (National Research Council, 2012, p. 20). There are also a growing number of DBER faculty positions each year at all types of higher education institutions (Bush, Rudd, Stevens, Tanner, & Williams, 2016). While significant growth in DBER has occurred within individual STEM disciplines, there has been minimal cross-discipline work. Individual STEM DBER fields, such as physics education research or biology education research, developed independently and have largely remained separate, with separate conferences, journals, and research interests. Opportunities for cross-discipline work also exist between STEM DBER fields and nonSTEM disciplines, such as cognitive science, higher education, and economics. Building on prior discussions across DBER communities, at the Transforming Research in Undergraduate STEM Education (TRUSE) conference, held on November 18–19, 2016, the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the Association of Public and Land-grant Universities brought together a group of 26 thought leaders from the DBER communities to begin articulating the affordances of developing an intersectional DBER community, * Correspondence: [email protected] Department of Physics and the Mallinson Institute for Science Education, Western Michigan University, 1903 W. Michigan Avenue, Kalamazoo, MI 49008-5252, USA Full list of author information is available at the end of the article International Journal of STEM Education