RCN: INTERACT: An Incubator to Enable Scalable Education Equity Research with Terracotta

Improving equity in education is essential to national progress, particularly in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) fields, where inequities based on sociodemographic characteristics are pronounced. To remedy these inequities, research is needed to understand educational practices and cues in the STEM learning environment, and their psychological impacts on students. These practices and cues include what teachers, staff, and administrators say and do, their policies and instructional practices, their interactions with students, and the norms they set for students’ interactions with one another. These situational factors are important because they causally impact students' learning, motivation, achievement, and persistence in STEM fields. Despite the national importance of successful and equitable STEM education, there is still great need for basic tools and infrastructure to support rigorous, scalable research within STEM learning environments. However, a new generation of research infrastructure has recently begun to emerge, enabled by the digital transformation of education. As teachers and schools increasingly use digital platforms for instruction, class assignments, sharing resources, student interaction, and data collection and storage, there is an opportunity to leverage these digital platforms to fill education research infrastructure gaps. Terracotta is an emerging research tool that makes it possible to experimentally manipulate many of these capabilities of the digital learning environment, while also providing robust protections for student privacy and agency. To ensure that Terracotta addresses the needs of high priority research studies, this Mid-scale Research Infrastructure Incubator project will convene a diverse network of researchers who study education, learning, and social equity, as well as technologists and stakeholders in education, and will identify consensus infrastructure requirements. Incubator members will receive training on cutting-edge findings about processes that foster equity in education and will collaboratively envision how Terracotta can develop into a national infrastructure that advances this research. The project will occur in three phases: (1) Needs Assessment: Identifying high-impact research needs for examining the influence of situational and instructional cues on STEM outcomes; (2) Infrastructure Design: Co-creation of infrastructure solutions for filling the range of research needs identified in Phase 1; and (3) Synthesis: Integrating the incubator products into a consensus research infrastructure plan. In Phases 1 and 2, incubator members will meet at multi-day in-person convenings to identify research questions, and the corresponding infrastructure needed, to lead to greater STEM education equity. In Phase 3, the steering committee will synthesize incubator products into a coherent plan for national STEM education research infrastructure. Additionally, the INTERACT incubator also makes active strides toward diversifying the STEM education research workforce, by constructing a community of racially and gender diverse researchers, stakeholders, and graduate trainees who are vested in the incubator’s products and who constitute the future of STEM education equity research. 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 NSF’s EDU Core Research Program. 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.