January 2021
The AERA-ICPSR PEERS Data Hub will hold a free workshop on “Modern Meta-Analysis Research” on February 10, 1:00 pm–3:30 pm ET. The workshop is the first in a series of webinars offered through the PEERS Data Hub that will focus on research methods in STEM education research. The workshop will broadcast live on Zoom. ASL interpretation and captioning will be provided. Attendees can register here.
Taught by leading experts Terri Pigott at Georgia State University and Joshua Polanin and Ryan Williams at the American Institutes for Research, the workshop will focus on best practice methods for meta-analysis and the synthesis of results from quantitative studies.
Instructors will provide a brief overview of the steps of a systematic review and introduce effect sizes typically used in STEM systematic reviews, including the standardized mean difference and correlations. Participants will learn basic principles of meta-analysis in the context of systematic reviews for STEM education and get practice extracting information needed for effect sizes from STEM research studies.
Additionally, the workshop will demonstrate the use of the R program metafor for computing effect sizes. Participants will use this program to compute the mean effect size and its heterogeneity across a set of studies. Instructors will introduce basic techniques for estimating the mean effect size and for exploring effect size heterogeneity across studies.
The series is in collaboration with the Institutes in Research Methods (IRM), which is funded by the National Science Foundation and directed to NSF’s Building Capacity for STEM Education Research (BCSER) program. Aimed at early- and mid-career researchers and scholars, the capacity-building webinar series features 11 projects that seek to promote research expertise in applications of computational, quantitative, qualitative, and evaluative research methods useful to STEM education researchers and broaden the STEM professional workforce. Additional webinars in the series will be held throughout 2021.
“We are thrilled to launch this webinar series with a workshop with such an impressive team of scholars presenting on an important and timely topic,” said AERA Executive Director Felice J. Levine, project principal investigator. “It is a great professional development opportunity for researchers to expand their skill sets and further their research efforts."
The PEERS Data Hub was launched by AERA and the Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR) in November 2020. It is an NSF-funded collaborative space for STEM education research communities to build and advance knowledge by sharing innovative ideas, methods, and tools. The platform is supported by NSF through its Core Research Program in the Directorate for Education and Human Resources.
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