2025 Distinguished Public Service Award Lecture: Evolving Research for Impact – People, Purposes, and Periods in Time Reflections on Public Service for STEM and Beyond

Session Type: Invited Speaker Session

Abstract

In 1945 Vannevar Bush wrote: “Scientific progress is one essential key to our security as a nation, to our better health, to more jobs, to a higher standard of living, and to our cultural progress.” The concept of research as a public good, and calls for more such research, independent of funding source, are central to education and many other fields. Such calls and assumptions beg questions about which publics, what counts as good, what purposes are being advanced, what constitutes impact, and how do priorities change over time.

Using examples from my experiences in STEM and STEM education, I will explore how dimensions of research for the public good evolve. Changes in policy contexts, societal needs, institutional circumstances, and even the new knowledge and tools that research produces affect the evolution of research. And, reciprocally, research for the public good can influence, inform, and impact policy, society, institutions, and the quest for more new knowledge and tools. How can this bi-directionality be lifted up, and even accelerated over periods of time when changes around us happen rapidly?

Research for the public good may stand its best chances of having impact and enduring when it reshapes how problems areframed to address potential users' needs, contemplates a range of questions, and interprets findings for multiple publics. Using examples from STEM education, federal STEM research leadership, the mathematics standards movement, and institutional change in higher education, I illustrate how public service can enable the promotion of research to inform and impact the public good.

Sub Unit

• AERA Sessions

Chair

• Elizabeth H. DeBray, University of Georgia

Presenter

• Joan E. Ferrini-Mundy, University of Maine