Collaborative Research:IGE: Scaling Faculty Development to Broaden Participation in Graduate Education

Rochester Institute Of Tech, Rochester NY

Investigators

Abstract

This National Science Foundation Innovations in Graduate Education (IGE) award to the University of Southern California and Rochester Institute of Technology will pilot a network of faculty and administrators across six major California universities that aims to improve how universities choose the scientists of the future. Currently, the demographic composition of the student body in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) doctoral programs and the scientific workforce is not only different from the composition of U.S. demographics, but it is also changing more slowly than the demographic shifts in the US. It is important to address these inequities in order to create a robust domestic scientific workforce, which may contribute to a healthy economy and promote U.S. scientific superiority. Inherited practices for recruiting, admitting, and mentoring graduate students contribute to these inequities, as does the lack of opportunity for faculty to reflect upon their practices in these areas. This award creates innovative systems by which faculty can improve those practices, and therefore holds significant promise as a strategy for broadening participation in graduate education and the scientific workforce. The project will form a network that provides faculty and graduate school administrators within and across the University of Southern California and University of California campuses at Berkeley, Davis, Irvine, Los Angeles, and Santa Barbara with opportunity and incentives to critically reflect upon and change longstanding practices. Participating STEM PhD programs will receive professional development from project leaders in the form of workshops and continuous learning activities on recruiting, admitting, and mentoring graduate students from diverse backgrounds. Leaders that emerge from each program in years 1 and 2 will be selected to establish campus-level teams who will deliver similar faculty-to-faculty learning opportunities on their own campuses. The research and evaluation activities of the project involve a sequential multi-method study, including the first-ever clustered randomized experiment to test the impact of faculty development around three outcomes: the admissions practices that PhD programs use, the diversity of their admitted cohorts, and the programs' selectivity. The structure of the network allows for sustainable gains, and it works with, rather than against, the decentralized nature of graduate education and its varied institutional and disciplinary contexts. The Innovations in Graduate Education (IGE) program is focused on research in graduate education. The goals of IGE are to pilot, test and validate innovative approaches to graduate education and to generate the knowledge required to move these approaches into the broader community. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.