College of Education

ESTEME is a campus wide group of STEM education faculty whose research extends from elementary through college.  Research has involved upper division curricular reforming, scaling up instructional techniques to large courses, developing understanding of specialized mathematical and science knowledge for teaching and professional development, analyzing science teacher thinking, and designing new teaching approaches linking science and engineering.  Research on STEM education has moved from a paradigm of knowledge “transmission” to a re-examination of what it means to “know” within the STEM disciplines: the nature of scientific inquiry, adaptive technical expertise, engineering design principles, and mathematical habits of mind.   That shift has profound implications for the invention and implementation of instructional innovations, the assessment of learning, and the evaluation of educational programs.   For the academy, accountability is measured in terms of quantity, quality, and diversity of the new members it inducts into communities defined by discipline-based ways of thinking, approaches to problem solving, and languages of communication.   This means re-imagining academic courses and programs as not merely delivery systems for information, but rather as structured environments affording opportunities for learners to engage with ideas (and with each other) in settings that support them becoming practitioners in STEM disciplines.  The Colleges of Science, Engineering, and Education are building a networked cadre of discipline-based educational researchers who create, inform, assess, and disseminate the best research knowledge in this arena.