The VERSA initiative and other efforts around campus advance UC San Diego’s leadership in the growing DBER field. Universities are becoming a nexus of DBERs, with experts and researchers spread across departments on campus.
āItās important to pay attention to how you teach science,ā Owens says. āBetter teaching methods allow others to shine and prepare science to become more inclusive in the future.ā
Discipline-based educational research is also changing long-held ideas about what makes an effective teacher. It has traditionally been believed that research experts automatically turn into competent educators.
“There’s a misconception in academia that having expertise in a field makes you an expert in teaching and education,” Bassey says. āI want to change the idea that once you become an instructor, you just keep doing what you’ve always done.ā
GodĆnez Aguilarās āāVERSA research project, āUsing Chemical Interventions to Reduce Equity Gaps in Introductory Biology Courses,ā took him on a challenging dive into raw data and numbers.
āMy experience with the VERSA program taught me a lot about how to think and reason like a scientist,ā said Godinez Aguilar. Godinez-Aguilar said that under the guidance and guidance of her mentors Owens and Assistant Professor Claire Meaders, she was able to develop the skills necessary to analyze data and draw conclusions from it. .
āI know these skills will continue to serve me well beyond the scope of my research project,ā he said. āVERSA has led me to consider research in science education as a serious career path, and I am now eyeing a PhD program in science education, something I had never considered before attending VERSA.ā Thatās true.ā
Bussey and Owens hope that VERSA will serve as a model for future research experience undergraduate programs and make the field of DBER more visible to a broader range of students.
āI applied to this program because I thought it would be a great opportunity to continue my journey in the field of education research,ā said Leah Sanchez, a fourth-year student at the University of Georgia. āWhile working at VERSA this summer, we had many conversations about potential future career options and graduate school options. I was able to learn a lot through this and was inspired to consider my future. It opened my eyes to more options available.ā