Practical Strategies for Collaboration across Discipline-Based Education Research and the Learning Sciences

摘要

Rather than pursue questions related to learning in biology from separate camps, recent calls highlight the necessity of interdisciplinary research agendas. Interdisciplinary collaborations allow for a complicated and expanded approach to questions about learning within specific science domains, such as biology. Despite its benefits, interdisciplinary work inevitably involves challenges. Some such challenges originate from differences in theoretical and methodological approaches across lines of work. Thus, aims at developing successful interdisciplinary research programs raise important considerations regarding methodologies for studying biology learning, strategies for approaching collaborations, and training of early-career scientists. Our goal here is to describe two fields important to understanding learning in biology, discipline-based education research and the learning sciences. We discuss differences between each discipline’s approach to biology education research and the benefits and challenges associated with incorporating these perspectives in a single research program. We then propose strategies for building productive interdisciplinary collaboration. Following 20 years of work considering what and how students are learning in undergraduate science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) classes, a robust database of evidence now underscores the necessity of reevaluating how we teach in STEM classrooms ( Freeman et?al ., 2014 ; Dolan, 2015 ). Calls for a “second generation” of research on undergraduate STEM education ( Freeman et?al ., 2014 ; Dolan, 2015 ) reflect great advancement in the field of discipline-based education research (DBER) but also point to a pivotal moment. We are not the first to suggest that this pivot should be away from distinct camps of related research and toward the interdisciplinary integration of these camps. In fact, Coley and Tanner (2012) point out that interdisciplinary collaborations between DBER and the learning sciences present a novel approach to understanding and improving STEM education. We extend this claim—touting the collaboration of these fields as providing not only novel but also crucial insight. Our aim here is to advance discussion surrounding the second generation of life sciences education research and provide practical strategies for collaboration across the life and learning sciences. The notion of a necessary shift toward interdisciplinary approaches to DBER is reflected in the National Research Council ( NRC, 2012 ) report, Discipline-Based Education Research: Understanding and Improving Learning in Undergraduate Science and Engineering . According to the report, high-quality research programs in DBER require individuals who intimately understand what it means to be an expert in a domain and the challenges associated with developing such expertise and an understanding of work in the behavioral and social sciences that describes findings related to human cognition, motivation, and learning. Although the importance of interdisciplinary research is highly endorsed, few interdisciplinary studies exist ( NRC, 2012 ). As pointed out in the report, the corpus of DBER research lacks robustness because of the lack of studies incorporating cognitive and educational psychology perspectives. Consequently, the committee that produced the 2012 report recommends that future research in DBER draw on decades of knowledge and experience produced by educational and cognitive psychologists. They argue that drawing from the existing psychology knowledge base will facilitate future DBER that expands focus to the mechanisms underlying learning. Furthermore, current DBER is divided into distinct subfields with little collaboration among science domains and with the learning sciences ( Talanquer, 2014 ). In this essay, we first attempt to operationalize DBER and the learning sciences as distinct disciplines in order to highlight the benefits of incorporating disciplinary knowledge from each into a single program of study. We introduce an analogy for synergy across these disciplines and describe how such synergy contributes to both theory refinement and classroom applications. We then identify challenges associated with interdisciplinary collaboration specific to DBER and the learning sciences. We close with suggested strategies for forming and maintaining productive interdisciplinary collaborations.