NSF INCLUDES DDLP: Increasing Minority Presence within Academia through Continuous Training (IMPACT)

代表不足的少数民族(URM)不到工程学教师的10%，尽管他们占全国人口的近三分之一。他们在工程学教职员工中比例过高的一个常见解释是，他们缺乏从其他教职员工那里获得有效指导的机会。这一NSF包括设计和开发启动试点项目将扩展一种新的指导和宣传-联网范例，将两个利益攸关方群体聚集在一起：(1)作为工程学教师的代表性不足的少数群体(URM)和(2)受人尊敬的(主要是非URM)名誉/退休的工程学教师。NSF之前资助的一个项目发现，双方都认为这种导师-学员配对是有利的，也是有益的，特别是URM工程学院。由于这些结果，研究人员建议通过创建国家基础设施网络合作伙伴来帮助提高服务于更多URM工程教员的能力，并引入远程指导和培训模式来服务于在偏远地理位置工作的URM教员，从而在更大范围内扩展、测试和评估该方法。该项目将使用多阶段现象学、混合方法研究设计，以更好地了解URM教员和荣誉教员体验项目提供的机会的方式。此外，调查人员计划收集数据，以检查项目参与者如何通过指导过程与使用具体化对话代理(ECA)来感知和体验传统的直接沟通(例如，电话、电子邮件和面对面会议)，ECA是通过使用语言-非语言渠道模拟面对面体验而使用户参与实时对话的拟人化界面代理。这个项目有可能扩大工程学教授的参与，并为支持URM工程学教师开辟新的可能性。

Underrepresented minorities (URMs) are less than 10% of engineering faculty, despite comprising nearly a third of the nation's population. A common explanation for their disproportionate representation, at the engineering faculty level, is related to a lack of access to effective mentorship from other faculty. This NSF INCLUDES Design and Development Launch Pilot project will expand a new mentoring and advocacy-networking paradigm to bring together two stakeholder groups: (1) underrepresented minorities (URMs) who are engineering faculty and (2) well-regarded (primarily non-URM) emeriti/retired engineering faculty. A previously-funded NSF project found that this mentor-mentee pairing was viewed favorable by both parties and beneficial, particularly by the URM engineering faculty. Because of these results, the investigators proposed to scale, test, and evaluate the approach on a broader scale by creating national infrastructural network partners to help increase capacity to serve a greater number of URM engineering faculty and to introduce tele-mentoring and training models to serve URM faculty who work in remote geographical locations with very little access to mentors.The project will use a multi-phased phenomenological, mixed method research design to gain greater understanding of the ways in which the URM faculty and emeriti faculty experience the opportunities afforded by the project. Further, the investigators plan to collect data to examine how project participants perceive and experience conventional, direct communications (e.g., telephone calls, e-mail, and in-person meetings)through the mentoring process versus the use of Embodied Conversational Agents (ECAs), anthropomorphic interface agents that engage a user in real-time dialogue by using verbal-nonverbal channels to emulate the in-person experience. This project has the potential to broaden participation in the engineering professoriate and opens up new possibilities for supporting URM engineering faculty.