BOSE Releases New report: Understanding and Improving Learning in Undergraduate Education

Discipline-Based Education Research: Understanding and Improving Learning in Undergraduate Science and Engineering (http://www.nap.edu/catalog.php?record_id=13362) describes insights that could improve undergraduate education in science and engineering. The report defines discipline-based education research (DBER) as a field of study that is emerging from parent disciplines such as physics, chemistry, biology, engineering, the geosciences, and astronomy. DBER investigates teaching and learning in a discipline, using a range of methods with grounding in the discipline’s priorities, worldview, knowledge, and practices. Notable findings include that student-centered learning strategies can enhance learning more than traditional lectures, students have incorrect understandings about fundamental concepts, particularly phenomena that are not directly obser!
vable, and students are challenged by important aspects of a particular domain that can seem easy or obvious to experts in that domain.  The report recommends that institutions, disciplinary societies, and professional societies support faculty efforts to use evidence-based teaching strategies in their classrooms; that they work together to prepare future faculty who understand research findings on learning and teaching and who value effective teaching as part of their career aspirations; and that they support venues for DBER scholars to share their research findings at meetings and in high-quality journals. Like most NRC reports, it also lays out future research directions including exploring similarities and differences in learning among various student populations; longitudinal studies that can shed light on how students acquire and retain understanding (or misunderstanding) of concepts; studies that investigate student outcomes other than test scores; and studies of organizational and behavior change that could aid the translation of DBER findings into practice