California AGEP Model to Increase the Success of Underrepresented Minority Postdoctoral Fellows Becoming Faculty in Mathematics, Engineering and Physical and Computer Sciences

University Of California-Berkeley, Berkeley CA

Investigators

Abstract

The University of California-Berkeley will lead a regional network with the University of California-Los Angeles, Stanford University and the California Institute of Technology to refine, implement, study, sustain, disseminate and begin expanding, reproducing and replicating the current multi-dimensional California AGEP Alliance model at the national level. This alliance was created in response to the NSF's Alliances for Graduate Education and the Professoriate (AGEP) program solicitation (NSF 16-552). The AGEP program seeks to advance knowledge about models to improve pathways to the professoriate and success of historically underrepresented minority (URM) graduate students, postdoctoral fellows and faculty in specific STEM disciplines and/or STEM education research fields. AGEP Transformation Alliances develop, replicate or reproduce; implement and study, via integrated educational and social science research, models to transform the dissertator phase of doctoral education, postdoctoral training and/or faculty advancement, and the transitions within and across the pathway levels, of URMs in STEM and/or STEM education research careers. As our nation is confronted with a STEM achievement gap between URM and non-URM undergraduate and graduate students, our universities and colleges struggle to recruit, retain and promote URM STEM faculty who serve as role models and academic leaders for URM students to learn from, to work with and to emulate. Recent NSF reports indicate that URM STEM associate and full professors occupy 8% of the senior faculty positions at all 4-year colleges and universities and about 6% of these positions at the nation's most research-intensive institutions. The California AGEP Alliance II has the potential to advance a model to improve the representation of URMs in STEM faculty positions, eventually providing URM STEM role models to STEM undergraduate and graduate students at postsecondary academic institutions across the Nation. The California AGEP Alliance II will refine the community-of-practice, research exchange, mentoring and professional development components of the model while significantly increasing the dissemination of state-of-the art knowledge about equitable and inclusive educational and mentoring practices to faculty who work with graduate students and postdoctoral fellows. The integrated research will continue investigating the intersections of identity, structure and belonging, including goals 1) to firmly establish the role of a structured graduate program as a core explanatory variables that accounts for significant disparities among student groups in research participation; 2) to examine the simultaneous role of belonging, alongside structure, as two axes along which to map the "psychological space" of STEM departments, and to examine the interplay of structure and belonging; and 3) to zero in on the ways in which students' stigmatized identities may be particularly sensitive to structure and belonging. Ethnographic and quantitative research methods will be used to address the research questions under investigation. The AAAS Trellis program will provide an online platform for the partnering institutions' collaboration efforts, for disseminating model information to a national STEM community, and for linking participants in the alliance with public and private organizations. The external project evaluation team will be led by Dr. Flora McMartin, who will also collaborate closely with the alliance internal evaluation/data collection staff. An external advisory board will provide advice to the project team through annual consultation.