Conference: Supporting Mentoring in STEM Graduate Education: A Proposal for Virtual Workshops and Supporting Activities

Council Of Graduate Schools, Washington DC

Investigators

Abstract

Through this project, the Council of Graduate Schools (CGS) will host two virtual workshops in 2024 that will inform the readiness of principal investigators to respond to NSF's new PAPPG requirements implemented in response to the America COMPETES Act of 2022 and the CHIPS and Science Act of 2022. Specifically, the workshops will address NSF requirements: (1) that all proposals to NSF include mentoring plans for all graduate students on NSF funded awards; (2) that institutions provide mentor training and mentorship and describe in grant proposals a plan to provide appropriate training and oversight in the Responsible and Ethical Conduct of Research; and (3) that each individual postdoctoral scholar and graduate student receiving substantial NSF support must have an Individual Development Plan, updated annually. The first workshop will focus on faculty researchers while the second will focus on graduate deans and other administrators who have responsibilities for expanding and enhancing graduate mentorship training across STEM fields. The proposal will fund the identification, development, and dissemination of mentoring resources and tools as well as promising practices and policies to enhance graduate mentoring and assist institutions and individual faculty in responding to the new NSF requirements. The resulting resources will address an important need for an accessible set of resources on evidence-based and promising practices and policies in graduate mentorship. A central goal of this proposal is to provide more accessible resources on effective mentoring to a broad range of institutions and universities serving diverse populations and in EPSCoR jurisdictions. 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.