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The purpose of this workshop is to introduce instructional and disciplinary tenure-track STEM faculty to high-quality qualitative research design in order to explore their intellectual curiosity around STEM education. We will do so using the ProQual approach, a methodologically unencumbered and widely accessible way of thinking about qualitative research design that was deployed and refined over the last three years as part of the NSF-funded ProQual Institute for Research Methods. This workshop will be conducted by STEM faculty who have graduated from the ProQual Institute, who are culturally sensitive to the challenges faced by disciplinary STEM faculty. Leveraging a propagation model of effecting academic change, these workshop leaders will also serve as a community of practice to help workshop participants move their educational research ideas forward during and after the workshop. 

In this paper, we report on the impacts of the ProQual Institute—a $1M award via the NSF ECREHR Core Research program in 2019—as it nears the end of its funding period. The ProQual Institute’s goal is to build national capacity for STEM education research by engaging technical STEM from across the U.S. in cohorts that participate in an 8-week course on qualitative and mixed methods educational research techniques, followed by engagement in several communities of practice to continue supporting participant research projects and building participants’ confidence as educational researchers. This project was funded based on impact rather than knowledge generation; thus, this paper will report on the impacts of the ProQual Institute in terms of participants served and evaluated outcomes and project team observations. The key evaluation questions we answered were: (1) To what extent did the project design and implement a high-quality and culturally responsive training program? (2) What knowledge and skills did participants gain because of participation in the ProQual Institute? (3) How could the ProQual Institute be built upon to improve participant outcomes?