Fourth International Conference on Quantitative Ethnography (ICQE22)

ECR's Building Capacity for STEM Education Research (ECR: BCSER) solicitation supports projects that build individuals' capacity to carry out high quality STEM education research that will enhance the nation's STEM education enterprise and broaden the pool of researchers that can conduct fundamental research in STEM learning and learning environments, broadening participation in STEM fields, and STEM workforce development.

Specifically, ECR: BCSER supports activities that enable early and mid-career researchers to acquire the requisite expertise and skills to conduct rigorous fundamental research in STEM education. ECR: BCSER seeks to fund research career development activities on topics that are relevant to qualitative and quantitative research methods and design, including the collection and analysis of new qualitative or quantitative data, secondary analyses using extant datasets, or meta-analyses.

This conference, to be held at the University of Wisconsin-Madison campus, will build the capacity of NSF-supported communities to benefit from the highly promising research methodology of quantitative ethnography (QE). This training workshop for young scholars, embedded in conference, supports the goals of the ECR program by developing a community of early career researchers to carefully use quantitative ethnography in the conduct of basic STEM education research.

These scholars will be prepared to examine and empirically test new theory consistent with the central goals of the ECR program. The funding will support: a) attendance and training at an international conference on QE for doctoral and early career researchers to be held in the U.S., b) a technical immersion preconference workshop that several of participating researchers would lead for these young scholars, and c) a broader slate of symposium speakers who represent NSF supported disciplines that QE methods can benefit significantly.

The intellectual merit of the conference arises both from the appeal or promise of QE across numerous fields. The proposed activities are organized around broadening the impact of QE’s intellectual merit across new disciplines. The project maintains a consistent emphasis on furnishing next-generation researchers with conceptual and software tools and methodology to address important current and future questions across the spectrum of fields NSF supports in social sciences, basic STEM education research, and the learning sciences.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.