Azadeh Bolhari
University of Colorado Boulder, CO·Education Research
Many scientists and engineers want to study how their own fields are taught and learned, but education research uses methods that feel unfamiliar to people trained in lab or technical work. Interpretive research, which uses qualitative methods such as interviews and close analysis of how people make meaning, asks different questions and follows different rules of evidence than experiments do.
- Fields
Education Research
Engineering
Social Science
- Topics
STEM education research
engineering education
qualitative research
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Sep 2028
What they work on
- Train about 48 STEM faculty and postdocs to approach education research as a design problem, using the ProQual Institute's 4-step program in interpretive research design.
- Build participants' qualitative and mixed-methods skills, combining interview-style and numerical data, as each person designs and carries out their own STEM education research project.
- Sustain a community of practice among institute participants that supports long-term sharing of knowledge about interpretive research in STEM education.
- Create "ProQual-in-a-Box" resources, web-accessible case studies showing key elements of the ProQual approach, so scholars beyond the institute can adopt it.
More about the research
That gap can keep faculty with STEM backgrounds from designing strong education studies.
Why it matters
Better-designed education research can give STEM departments more trustworthy evidence about how students learn engineering, science and math. By training faculty with technical backgrounds to run rigorous qualitative and mixed-methods studies, and by sharing free case-study materials online, the project aims to raise the quality of interpretive STEM education research done across many institutions.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Kaitlin Mallouk
Rowan University, NJ·Education Research
Build a two-year postdoctoral fellowship, grounded in social learning theory, in which STEM education Fellows take on research, proposal writing and teaching with growing independence.
Tracy Sweet
University of Maryland, MD·Education Research
Train three cohorts of 17 early career STEM education scholars through year-long intensive institutes on research design, measurement and data analysis for large-scale studies in K-12 and postsecondary settings.
Amy Gruss
Kennesaw State University, GA·Education Research
Measure how Visual Thinking Strategies (VTS), group discussion of ambiguous art at a campus museum, changes perspective-taking in first-year civil and environmental engineering students, using a validated scale.
The school
University of Colorado Boulder: 36 labs on PI Pages, $718M a year on research, 447 research doctorates a year.
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