This workshop is designed to catalyze relationships, understandings, and collaborations between early career disciplinary researchers in the earth, atmospheric, ocean, and polar sciences and scientific discipline based education researchers (DBERs) in the geosciences. These relationships are critical for two reasons: (1) to address the foundational educational research needed on how people learn geoscience content and develop into expert geoscientists, and (2) to facilitate early career geoscientists in enhancing the broader impacts of their geoscience research. The workshop is designed to grow mutually beneficial research collaborations amongst early career investigators that will build upon the extant literature reviewed in the National Research Council report, Discipline-Based Education Research: Understanding and Improving Learning in Undergraduate Science and Engineering (NRC, 2012).
The workshop will include a combination of plenary talks, panelist presentations, discussions and time for networking and collaboration. Early career geoscience researchers and DBERs will each bring important expertise to the workshop. The geoscience researchers can provide content specific instructional challenges and classroom/student access, while DBERs bring a knowledge of methodologies to study those challenges. Both groups will have the opportunity to develop new collaborations, with geoscience researchers gaining an understanding of the DBER process, and ideas for broadening the impact of their research, while DBERs will gain a better understanding of content challenges in the geosciences.
Workshop Goals
- Engage both geoscience and geoscience education communities in the identification of future synergistic research directions, and establish a list of action items.
- Nurture and prepare future leaders in the geoscience community to advance geoscience research and education.
- Promote cross-disciplinary awareness and relationships among early-career researchers in geoscience and geoscience education.
- Develop and share strategies for the design of competitive Broader Impacts components of proposals submitted to the Directorate of Geosciences and/or improve the quality of geoscience education related proposals submitted to the Directorate for Education and Human Resources.
For more information, please contact Nicole LaDue at nladue [at] niu.edu.