PEER: Professional Development Experiences for Education Researchers

To help foster the next generation of STEM education researchers, we have developed and conducted a two-part professional development model that combines intensive in-person workshops with long-term remote activities.Participants include emerging researchers at all career stages, including undergraduates, graduate students, postdoctoral researchers, junior faculty, and more senior faculty considering a change in research focus. In this paper, we outline two versions of the model: a distributed workshop where participants gather from all over the world for two weeks in-person, then disperse for ongoing remote meetings; and a regional workshop, where we facilitate education research among participants who live near each other. In both versions, emerging and established education researchers work closely together to develop research questions, learn appropriate analytic techniques, and, when possible, explore data. Workshops attract participants from a variety of STEM education research communities and have taken place in multiple countries, including Rwanda, Germany, Mexico and the United States. In this paper, we lay out the model for professional development, describe the different contexts we have explored, and discuss various results from the different manifestations