The ProQual Approach: An innovative, accessible, and community-oriented approach to qualitative educational research training for STEM faculty

This presentation presents the ProQual Approach to supporting STEM instructional and tenure-track faculty in conducting qualitative educational research. Historically, integrating these two groups into STEM education research communities has been both challenging and essential to long-term, systemic STEM education change. Both groups are responsible for the education of students in students in STEM disciplines, and educational research provides them means to continuously improve educational practices and engage more deeply with their identities as educators. However, helping STEM faculty develop educational research skills necessitates overcoming barriers such as epistemological tensions between social and natural sciences (Berliner, 2002; Borrego, 2007; Labaree, 2003) and limited access to STEM education communities.

The ProQual Approach was designed to overcome these challenges using a model of educational research training defined by two guiding principles. First, leaders of the process begin by helping faculty identify a well-scoped specific research problem they want to solve. In doing so, the ProQual Approach gets STEM faculty invested in their research ideas and allows leaders to justify how qualitative research is appropriate for their ideas, rather than trying to justify its value as an abstract methodology. Second, the entire training process is conducted in the context of a supportive cohort of STEM faculty, with the leaders of the process gradually taking off the "training wheels" and letting the cohort members support one another as growing educational research experts. Doing so allows participants to build confidence in their skills and develop a network of colleagues at their skill level that they can continue to access once the formal training is complete.

The ProQual approach was refined and tested via a $1M NSF ECR:BCSER grant, and was pioneered by UGA's Engineering Education Research Institute through their novel engineering education research incubator approach (Sochacka, Walther, Morelock, Hunsu, & Carnell, 2020). The approach was successfully implemented at the national level for 48 faculty from several STEM disciplines across three cohorts. In this presentation, I will present the ProQual Approach itself, as well as evaluation data from the NSF project on the impacts of its implementation.

References:
Berliner, D. C. (2002). Comment: Educational research: The hardest science of all. Educational Researcher, 31(8), 18-20.

Borrego, M. (2007). Conceptual difficulties experienced by trained engineers learning educational research methods. Journal of Engineering Education, 96(2), 91-102.

Labaree, D. (2003). The peculiar problems of preparing educational researchers. Education Researcher, 32, 13-22. doi:10.3102/0013189X014001014

Sochacka, N. W., Walther, J., Morelock, J. R., Hunsu, N. J., & Carnell, P. H. (2020). Cultivating a culture of scholarly teaching and learning in a college of engineering: An ecological design approach. Australasian Journal of Engineering Education, 25(2), 165-176. doi:10.1080/22054952.2020.1864087