WASHINGTON — Discipline-based education research (DBER) has
generated insights that could help improve undergraduate
education in science and engineering, but these findings have
not yet prompted widespread changes in teaching practice, says a
new report from the National Research Council. Science and
engineering faculty, institutions, disciplinary societies, and
professional societies should all support high-quality DBER and
the adoption of the evidence-based teaching strategies that have
emerged from it, the report says. DBER is a collection of
related research fields that investigate how students learn in
particular scientific disciplines and identify ways to improve
instruction. This research is emerging in many scientific
disciplines, including physics, chemistry, biology, the
geosciences, and astronomy, as well as in engineering. A DBER
scholar in physics, for example, might investigate how students
learn concepts such as force or acceleration and try to identify
effective ways for instructors to teach