Community for Advancing Discovery Research in Education (CADRE)

Challenge

Improving STEM education is a team effort. It requires dedicated teachers, researchers, curriculum developers, and scholars all working together to support innovation and excellence in the classroom.

This idea is the foundation for the Community for Advancing Discovery Research in Education (CADRE), an EDC-led network for STEM education researchers who have been funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) Discovery Research Pre-K–12 (DRK–12) program. CADRE supports and accelerates learning among the DRK-12 community about the practice and outcomes of STEM education research. We help project teams leading NSF-funded initiatives across the United States to connect with each other, share important discoveries, and develop the innovative products that will shape the future of STEM education.

Key Activities

EDC’s CADRE staff support a network of more than 300 actively funded NSF projects and their principal investigators (PIs) and project staff. Examples of CADRE’s key activities follow:

Convene DRK–12-funded researchers to share and generate knowledge about improving STEM education
Lead the CADRE Fellows and postdoc programs, providing capacity-building professional development experiences for early career researchers and developers
Disseminate pre-K–12 STEM education and research news and information to more than 3,000 STEM education researchers
Provide evidence-based resources to more than 7,000 teachers, administrators, and industry representatives via a website, social media, podcasts, video showcases, and webinars

Impact

Supported the capacity building of more than 1,000 DRK–12 projects and their principal investigators (PIs) and program staff since 2008
Supported a new cohort of 10 CADRE Fellows each year since 2009 and new biennial cohorts of five postdocs since 2018
Create and curate resources for education researchers, including the NSF Proposal Toolkit, NSF Project Management Tools, and Dissemination Toolkit
Survey findings show that the CADRE Fellows Program enables participants to network with early career peers, prepares them to advance their research, exposes them to the NSF community and funding contexts, acquaints them with different work contexts and career tracks, and bolsters their credentials or career tracks
Survey findings also show that participants in CADRE’s DRK–12 PI meetings believe that the meetings fulfill their purpose of providing PIs with opportunities to engage with other awardees, share their own work, learn about the work of others, and explore new information and strategies they can apply to their own work