What is Entomology Education Research?

When I mention that I conduct research in education, people usually nod and acknowledge me as if they fully understand. My research topics are relatable because we've all been in a classroom at some point, and as long as people are familiar with the term entomology, it's assumed I'm being understood. But what exactly is entomology education research? To be honest, it wasn't until the second year of my PhD that I could clearly explain what I meant by "education research," and there is more history to this type of research than I initially realized.

It helps to first frame Entomology Education Research (EER) within the context of similar fields of study. Discipline-Based Education Research (DBER) is a burgeoning field that investigates teaching practices in order to understand how students achieve mastery in their individual disciplines (National Research Council 2012). Benefitting from advances in the fields of cognitive science, educational psychology, and the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL), a number of DBER fields have been established (National Research Council 2012). From the initiation of physics education research (PER) in the 1920’s, to the more recent development of biology education research (BER) in the 1980’s, DBER fields may differ in the topics they address, but are similar in their goals to:

• “understand how people learn the concepts, practices, and ways of thinking of science and engineering; 

• understand the nature and development of expertise in a discipline; 

• help identify and measure appropriate learning objectives and instructional approaches that advance students toward those objectives; 

• contribute to the knowledge base in a way that can guide the translation of DBER findings to classroom practice; and 

• identify approaches to make science and engineering education broad and inclusive.” (National Research Council 2012, pg. 2)

Biology Education Research (BER) is situated within the larger umbrella that is DBER, and only began to find traction as a field of study in the late 2010’s (Lo et al. 2019), punctuated by the establishment of the Society for the Advancement of Biology Education Research (SABER). Biology is characterized by a multitude of subdisciplines, and SABER was established to centralize and disseminate the knowledge being generated about the teaching and learning of the broader topic that is biology (Hsu et al. 2021). 

As the sub-discipline of entomology is nested within biology, so too is Entomology Education Research (EER) nested within BER. As an example of Discipline-Based Education Research, EER is characterized by the same goals outlined by the National Research Council (2012) but within an entomological context. It may be true that knowledge collected in the pursuit of BER and EER may be translational and benefit from direct application in either direction, but I argue that Entomology Education Research deserves delineation from the field of BER due to the added value inherently awarded in the use of insects as an educational model. 

To this end, EER can be described as the research conducted in order to determine how future entomologists engage with, learn about, and eventually master entomology. This involves research qeustions that ask what teaching practices are best used in these contexts, and what role the learning environemnt plays in these endeavors.

TL;DR - Entomology Education Research (EER) is a varietal of the broader Discipline Based Education Research (DBER) and aims to understand how entomology is taught and learned.

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References:

• Hsu, J. L., Chen, A., Cruz-Hinojoza, E., Dinh-Dang, D., Roth-Johnson, E. A., Sato, B. K., & Lo, S. M. (2021). Characterizing biology education research: perspectives from practitioners and scholars in the field. Journal of microbiology & biology education, 22(2), 10-1128.

• Lo, S. M., Gardner, G. E., Reid, J., Napoleon-Fanis, V., Carroll, P., Smith, E., & Sato, B. K. (2019). Prevailing questions and methodologies in biology education research: A longitudinal analysis of research in CBE—Life Sciences Education and at the Society for the Advancement of Biology Education Research. CBE—Life Sciences Education, 18(1),9.

• National Research Council. (2012). Discipline-based education research: Understanding and improving learning in undergraduate science and engineering, S. R. Singer, N. R. Nielsen, & H. A. Schweingruber (Eds.), Washington, DC: The National Academies Press.