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  • 1.  Tell us about why you joined the DBER community forum

    Posted 04-13-2022 04:44 PM
    Welcome to the DBER community forum. I am looking forward to getting to know all the DBER community members. Please respond to this post with an answer to either of these questions:
    • What most excites you about recent DBER findings?
    • What most excites you about your current DBER work? 


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    Michael Feder, AAAS
    He|Him
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  • 2.  RE: Tell us about why you joined the DBER community forum

    Posted 04-28-2022 10:42 PM
    I'll see if I can get the comments rolling - I am most excited about the individual efforts to set the standards of robustness for qualitative and quantitative methods in DBER. With robust methods, I'm hopeful - perhaps overly so - that we will be able to better convince our traditional disciplinary colleagues of the important findings that come from the DBER fields!

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    Jordan Harshman
    Auburn AL
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    Original Message


  • 3.  RE: Tell us about why you joined the DBER community forum

    Posted 05-02-2022 01:04 PM
    Thanks Jordan for staring this thread! I'd love to hear from other people on this issue.  I tend to be skeptical about the role of evidence in convincing people. I have been known to say that "evidence is very good at convincing people of things that they already basically agree with, but not so good at changing their minds." I also think that a lot of evidence already exists for many core DBER findings.

    So, my question to the DBER community is, what can/should we be doing to convince our traditional disciplinary colleagues? Collect more evidence (what types?), Make existing evidence more easily digestible (in what ways?), Work on other persuasion channels (e.g., peers, institutional structures/pressures).

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    Charles Henderson
    DBER-ALL
    ASCN
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    Original Message


  • 4.  RE: Tell us about why you joined the DBER community forum

    Posted 05-18-2022 01:06 PM
    I agree with Charles' take on the role of evidence -- the evidence is important to have, but may not be the best way to convince skeptical colleagues. I think the DBER community could make better use of the psychological literature on attitude change. People working with climate change skeptics have developed useful methods based on evidence for talking to climate change skeptics. DBER should be developing similar methods and talking points for folks like us. I've talked about this in the physics education research community before, so I'm excited about the idea that a DBER-central community could coordinate a bit more and have some central resources... rather than those of us in each -ER field developing our own approaches.

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    Stephanie Chasteen
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    Original Message


  • 5.  RE: Tell us about why you joined the DBER community forum

    Posted 08-13-2022 11:49 AM
    I'm going to weigh in and agree with Charles and Stephanie that evidence is useful in later conversations with colleagues. Our colleagues have made a huge investment to get where they are. Along the way, many of us will pick-up some aspects of imposter syndrome. This is also a time when our colleagues have formed their identity as an expert in their discipline. Buried in that identity is the socially-prescribed notion that "experts can teach." If we are not careful in our discussions with colleagues we will encounter a lot of baggage ingrained into their self-perceptions. Even evidence-based scientists cannot interpret data that runs counter to their identity.

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    Thomas Foster
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    Original Message