Recommendations
The 2022-2026 NSF Strategic Plan states:
Advances in how we learn, work, collaborate and explore are creating opportunities to greatly increase the rate of discovery and broaden participation in S&E. An increasingly diverse global research community is enriching the breadth of questions that can be asked and answered.
The increasing rate of discovery and breadth of questions that can be asked and answered is particularly true in education—especially as technology brings profound opportunities to transform how people learn and broader opportunities to participate in STEM. In our four recommendations below, we highlight the supports needed by fields nurtured by the EXPs (and facilitated by the CIRCLS resource center), as they rapidly explore a breadth of highly innovative learning approaches made possible by rapidly advancing technologies.
Recommendation 1: Create consistent opportunities for the field to engage in future-oriented, interdisciplinary, exploratory research across programs and directorates.
NSF EXPs are time-limited programs that support collaborative, interdisciplinary, research. These programs emphasize bringing together investigators who otherwise might pursue funding in disparate, non-overlapping NSF directorates and programs. Exploratory research has grown and thrived with awards from these programs—indicating the field’s strong interest in pursuing interdisciplinary design research with novel technologies for learning. The possibilities of AI and emerging technologies for education are capturing national attention from every educational role and perspective. A discovery-oriented, interdisciplinary, exploratory field is needed now more than ever. Thus, now is the time to consider how to create consistent and stable opportunities to bring innovators together across traditional NSF directorates and programs to collaborate, increase the rate of discovery, and address the challenges of broadening participation—and ultimately, to ask and answer questions about the future of teaching and learning that can only be asked and answered through such collaborations.
Recommendation 2: Intentionally nurture interdisciplinary research identities.
This and prior CIRCLS reports have consistently found strong evidence that researchers who participate in exploratory research come to identify it as a home for their life’s work; we have found that researchers welcome an interdisciplinary, exploratory identity. Furthermore, Team Science continues to be a national strategy, recommended by the National Academies and resonant with prior NSF terms like “convergent science” or “interdisciplinary research.” Additional steps by leaders in the field and at NSF could promote, celebrate, and amplify interdisciplinary team science projects and the identities of those who participate in them; at a more detailed level, investing in training and development opportunities to support professional growth for individuals engaged in interdisciplinary, exploratory research is essential to enabling broad and diverse participation in team science projects and programs.
Recommendation 3: Continue to uncover processes, methods, and flows that are uniquely important in interdisciplinary, exploratory research.
Peer-reviewed journal articles are an imperfect medium for communicating what is learned from exploratory, interdisciplinary research as peer review tends to favor established research trajectories. As indicated in this report, novel insights can be gleaned from contextually rich discussions with project PIs to learn how research teams come together, how the research is conceptualized and conducted, and to gain new perspectives on research design and process. For example, we uncovered that the interdisciplinary breadth of the field is more than just computer science and learning sciences, that the first year of a project is often particularly fertile for the transformation of ideas, and that exploratory research flows both from and to other types of funding and projects. Over the years, CIRCLS has worked closely with this research community to tell the story of their research processes in multiple ways—highlighting their core ideas, innovations, partnerships and, now, explorations in this current report. Recognizing the value of documenting and understanding how innovation happens, and amplifying processes for doing so, is essential for building strong research communities and could serve NSF in framing solicitations to highlight and support the unique character of interdisciplinary, exploratory research.
Recommendation 4: Support coordination networks to grow the field, synthesize outcomes, and amplify broader impacts.
Throughout this report PIs cite “networked engagement” as one of the strengths of this portfolio, and the value of having a resource center, such as CIRCLS, to facilitate that. Coordination networks establish long-term relationships with community members, provide a platform for collaborative work through meetings, reports, and dissemination opportunities, and enable deeper understanding of members’ projects and work trajectories over time. Networks can identify approaches for brokering connections across interdisciplinary research spaces. Networks can also support the synthesis of program outcomes across multiple dimensions of interest for the program and larger research community. As the field for interdisciplinary, exploratory research on learning technologies continues to grow, support for networked collaboration will likely pay strong dividends.
