STEM DBER Alliance Meeting at AAAS on November 18-19, 2016

Building on prior discussions across DBER communities and at the Transforming Research in Undergraduate STEM Education (TRUSE) conferences (https://www.chem.purdue.edu/towns/TRUSE/), in November 2016, the American Association for the Advancement of Science and NSEC brought together a group of 26 thought leaders from the DBER communities to begin articulating the affordances of developing an intersectional DBER community, envisioning what structures might best support such a community, and developing plans for advancing this agenda. It quickly became clear that tremendous advantage and synergy could be gained through the formation of an overarching DBER community that spans disparate disciplines that we called the STEM DBER Alliance (DBER-A).

At the meeting, some important foundational philosophies were discussed and agreed on. For example, it was felt that STEM DBER should be broadly defined so as to include the social sciences. The group generated an initial list of potential research topics they felt would be best addressed by a cross-disciplinary STEM DBER community, including the challenges of expanding diversity and inclusivity, the impact of cross-disciplinary introductory courses, and translational research on the adoption of research into teaching practice. The group generated a list of short- and long-term actions to continue the momentum. See the agenda and participants in Appendix 4.

Read more about the meeting here.

Participants:

Ann Austin, Professor, Higher Education and Director, Global Institute for Higher Education, Michigan State University

Monica Cardella, Associate Professor; Executive Director, Research Institute for Pre-College Engineering (INSPIRE), Purdue University

Mark Connolly, Associate Research Scientist, University of Wisconsin Madison

Melanie Cooper, Professor, Department of Teacher Education, Michigan State University

Monica Cox, Professor, Dept of Engineering Education; Department Chair, Dept of Engineering Education, Ohio State University

Scott Franklin, Director, Center for Advancing Science/Math Teaching, Learning & Evaluation, Rochester Institute of Technology

Jeffrey Froyd, TEES Research Professor in the Office of Engineering Academic and Student Affairs, Texas A&M University

Charles Henderson, Professor; Director, Center for Research on Instructional Change in Postsecondary Education, Western Michigan University

Kim Kastens, Doherty senior research scientist at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, Columbia University

Mary Kirchhoff, Director, Education Division, American Chemical Society

Felice Levine, Executive Director, American Educational Research Association

Michael Loui, Professor Emeritus, Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Shirley Malcom, Head, Education & Human Resources, American Association for the Advancement of Science

Cathy Manduca, Director, Science Education Resource Center, SERC, Carleton College

Melissa McCartney, Project Director, AAAS

Kathryn Miller, Chair, Department of Biology; Professor, Department of Biology, Washington University

Laura Novick, Associate Professor of Psychology and Human Development, Vanderbilt University

Chris Rasmussen, Professor, San Diego State University

Kacy Redd, Director, Science and Mathematics Education Policy, Association of Public and Land-grant Universities

Sarah Simmons, Assistant Director, Howard Hughes Medical Institute

Susan Singer, vice president for academic affairs and provost, Rollins College

Gordon Uno, Chair, Professor of Plant Biology; David Ross Boyd Professor of Botany, University of Oklahoma

Mark Urban-Lurain, Associate Professor, Associate Director for Engineering Education Research, Michigan State University

Dawn Rickey, NSF

Alejandro de la Puente, AAAS Fellow at NSF