What is DBER?

Discipline-Based Educational Research or DBER is an interdisciplinary research approach that utilizes disciplinary content knowledge and practices to inform educational research about the learning and/or teaching within that discipline. There are many disciplinary communities of DBER including chemistry education research, biology education research, physics education research, and math education research (to name a few). In each field, researchers are trained as a member of the disciplinary community, i.e., as a chemist or biologist. However, they are also trained as an educational researcher to ask and investigate questions about the teaching and learning of their content area of focus. The goal of this type of work is to develop, refine, and implement theoretical and methodological approaches to generate evidence-based knowledge about pedagogy, instructional materials or resources, processes of and factors influencing learning, and social, societal, and historical impacts on education in formal, informal, and non-formal spaces of learning.