Postdoctoral Fellowship: STEMEdIPRF: Pedagogical Content Knowledge for Course-based Undergraduate Research Instruction

Course-based undergraduate research experiences (CUREs) have increased access to research for all students, influencing student persistence and success in STEM. Participation in a CURE may be a student’s only experience conducting research, especially for students from marginalized and minoritized populations. Yet, little is known about how to teach these courses effectively. Quality CURE instruction is especially important at the introductory level when CUREs may be most influential for students and most varied in their implementation given that STEM lab courses are often taught by graduate student instructors who themselves have modest teaching and research experience. More work is needed to understand how instructors effectively support student growth and development in CUREs. This project intends to define pedagogical content knowledge (PCK) for research instruction, which is the knowledge an instructor has of science research, their students, and instructional approaches that are useful for guiding students in doing research. This project has the potential to inform national conversations about the knowledge necessary to teach CUREs effectively. This knowledge is critical given the widespread implementation of CUREs and relatively limited insights into the nature and types of instruction that make CUREs effective for diverse groups of students. Additionally, the results of this project have the potential to be useful for improving professional development programs nationally in order to better prepare CURE instructors, especially graduate student instructors who teach thousands of students across the country every year and are themselves future faculty. Using an established framework for characterizing the complexity of domain-specific teaching, this project aims to define and characterize PCK associated with research instruction. The project will involve developing, pilot testing, and refining a set of scenarios that reflect common teaching issues faced in CURE instruction. These scenarios will then be used to conduct think-aloud interviews with 30+ experienced CURE instructors to elicit the distinctive knowledge they employ to teach and support students during CURE instruction. Interviews will be analyzed inductively and deductively using standard qualitative content analysis procedures to define the core elements of research teaching PCK. Results from this analysis have the potential to address a substantive gap in knowledge about the expertise necessary to teach CUREs effectively by uncovering both pedagogical variation and instructor reasoning using the PCK framework. The project responds to the STEM Education Postdoctoral Research Fellowship (STEM Ed IPRF) program, which aims to enhance the research knowledge, skills, and practices of recent doctorates in STEM, STEM education, education, and related disciplines to advance their preparation to engage in fundamental and applied research that advances knowledge within the field. This project is funded by the STEM Education Postdoctoral Research Fellowship (STEM Ed PRF) program that aims to enhance the research knowledge, skills, and practices of recent doctorates in STEM, STEM education, education, and related disciplines to advance their preparation to engage in fundamental and applied research that advances knowledge within the field. 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.