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What if better teaching starts with a deeper understanding of how students learn?
That question is at the heart of Discipline-Based Education Research (DBER), an interdisciplinary field that combines expertise in an academic discipline with education research to better understand how students learn and how teaching can be improved to facilitate learning.
At Auburn University, a growing community of faculty members is exploring those questions across multiple STEM disciplines. An award from the National Science Foundation will help expand that work by bringing nine graduate research fellows to Auburn to conduct DBER research. The award is titled “NSF EPSCoR Graduate Fellowship Program (EGFP): Promoting Multidisciplinary Opportunities in Discipline-Based Education Research”. 
The fellowship program will recruit students who received an honorable mention through the NSF Graduate Research Fellowship Program (GRFP), a highly competitive national program. Although they were not selected for a fellowship, these students earned NSF recognition for the strength of their applications and research potential. These highly accomplished students will join graduate programs across participating STEM disciplines while becoming part of a collaborative DBER cohort at Auburn.
“Auburn provides a unique environment for this kind of work because of the breadth of our faculty expertise across STEM disciplines,” said Eric Burkholder, an associate professor of physics and principal investigator for the grant. “This fellowship allows us to bring together talented graduate students who can learn from one another while contributing to research that has the potential to improve STEM education well beyond Auburn.”
“Recruiting people who have some background in disciplinary STEM, but are interested in education research, allows us to bring together a broad group of academics making everyone’s experience richer.”
DBER researchers might study how students develop an understanding of a difficult concept, whether a particular teaching strategy improves learning or how assessments can better measure what students know.
Auburn’s strength lies in having faculty members conducting this type of research across disciplines within the College of Sciences and Mathematics and Samuel Ginn College of Engineering. That concentration is unusual among universities, where STEM education research is often conducted by individual faculty members or within groups outside of STEM departments.
“We are spread across disciplinary departments, but we are also each, individually, quite interdisciplinary,” said Karen McNeal, professor in the Department of Geosciences and co-principal investigator on the grant. “Recruiting people who have some background in disciplinary STEM, but are interested in education research, allows us to bring together a broad group of academics making everyone’s experience richer.”
The new fellows will join an existing community that already includes cross-disciplinary DBER meetings and a monthly seminar. Auburn is also working to develop a DBER Center and explore a certificate program that would provide a more structured pathway for students interested in the field. This formalization of the DBER program will bring together courses, training modules and other resources faculty have developed within their individual departments.
“I am most excited about the shared infrastructure this program will provide,” said Melinda Lanius, an assistant professor of mathematics and statistics and co-principal investigator on the grant. “It will bring people together and create a stronger community while unifying and streamlining resources to better support not only these nine fellows, but future DBER graduate students as well.”
The effort builds on nearly a decade of DBER research at Auburn. Faculty have graduated students who have gone on to faculty positions at universities across the country, helping extend Auburn’s impact on STEM education.
“Our ultimate objective is to improve undergraduate STEM education at Auburn and beyond,” said Cissy Ballen, associate professor in the Department of Biological Sciences and co-principal investigator on the grant. “This will help us build the capacity to get there.”
The fellowship is another step toward Auburn’s broader goal of becoming a DBER hub in the Southeast, bringing together researchers and graduate students from multiple STEM disciplines to address shared challenges in teaching and learning.
Recruitment for the new fellowship cohort is underway. By bringing talented emerging researchers into a collaborative environment that is still relatively uncommon at universities, Auburn is positioning itself to advance not only research on how students learn, but also the future of STEM education.
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