Engineering and Science Education, PhD

Program Description

The PhD program in Engineering and Science Education is a nationally unique graduate program in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) education research. The Department of Engineering and Science Education (ESE) in the College of Engineering, Computing and Applied Sciences is the only department in the country that includes both engineering education and science education in a college of science and engineering. As such, it includes faculty who are experts in several areas of science education and engineering education, and who have active research programs in these fields. Students in this program are exposed to a wide breadth of STEM education research under current investigation and are prepared to interface between the development of new theory in STEM education and the implementation of new research findings in practice. This discipline-based education research (DBER) combines knowledge of teaching and learning with deep knowledge of discipline-specific science content. It describes the discipline-specific difficulties learners face and the specialized intellectual and instructional resources that can facilitate student understanding.

The objectives of the ESE PhD program are to prepare students for academic careers in STEM education, science education policy in higher education or informal education institutions, or a range of other careers that require a deep disciplinary knowledge coupled with understanding of the factors that affect student learning, retention, and inclusion in STEM. Students who enroll in this program are expected to be content experts in a STEM discipline with at least a Master’s degree in their content area of expertise. Graduates from this program are prepared to become faculty in traditional departments of engineering or science, as well as STEM education departments. They are prepared to lead curricular and pedagogical reform at the post-secondary level as well as conduct research in the burgeoning fields of STEM education research.