RCN: Incubating Infrastructure for Experimentation on Inclusive STEM Teaching Practices

K-12 teachers are a critical resource for promoting equitable STEM achievement and attainment. Experimental research, however, rarely identifies specific, transferable STEM instructional practices, because STEM education research has typically implemented student-level randomization far more than it has implemented teacher-level randomization. A major barrier limiting scientific progress is the lack of a large-scale trialing infrastructure that can support teacher-level randomization and experimentation, given the logistical constraints of recruiting multiple sites and successfully randomizing at the teacher or classroom level.

Challenges in three major areas need to be addressed before such a teacher-level trialing infrastructure could be built. These are: (1) optimal research-practice partnerships that maintain standing research agreements; (2) research design issues such as statistical power and contamination; and (3) data sharing, merging, analysis, and reporting in a large network of participating schools and teachers.

A cross-cutting set of challenges, relevant to all three areas, involves training of experimenters to conduct relevant and ethical field experiments, addressing diversity and inclusion in the researchers and participants, and maintaining a fair and equitable governance structure.

This Midscale Research Infrastructure Incubator will launch a two-year, accelerated process to address these challenges and develop a consensus plan for a STEM-teacher-focused trialing platform. Stakeholders will be from diverse communities, including STEM educators and administrators; teacher professional learning organizations; pre-service teacher training programs; statistics and data science; and the social and behavioral sciences.

Through large-group meetings and focused task forces, plans for an infrastructure will be developed by addressing each of the three major areas, as well as the cross-cutting issues. The project output will include working papers and prototypes that can serve as a “blueprint” for a large, open trialing infrastructure. This infrastructure aims to dramatically accelerate the pace of research and innovation for STEM instructional practices that lead to greater learning for diverse student groups.

This project is supported through a partnership with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Schmidt Futures, and the Walton Family Foundation. Funding is also provided by the Advancing Informal STEM Learning (AISL) Program at NSF.

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.