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

这项授予南加州大学和罗切斯特理工学院的国家科学基金会研究生教育创新奖将在六所主要加州大学试行教师和管理人员网络，旨在改善大学如何选择未来的科学家。目前，科学，技术，工程和数学（STEM）博士课程的学生群体和科学劳动力的人口构成不仅与美国的人口构成不同，而且变化速度也比美国的人口变化慢。重要的是要解决这些不平等问题，以创造一支强大的国内科学劳动力队伍，这可能有助于健康的经济和促进美国的科学优势。继承的做法招聘，录取和指导研究生有助于这些不平等，因为教师没有机会反思他们在这些领域的做法。该奖项创建了创新系统，教师可以通过这些系统来改进这些实践，因此，作为扩大研究生教育和科学劳动力参与的战略，具有重大的前景。该项目将形成一个网络，为南加州大学和加州大学伯克利分校、戴维斯分校、欧文分校、洛杉矶分校和圣巴巴拉分校的教师和研究生院管理人员提供批判性反思和改变长期做法的机会和激励。参与STEM博士课程将以研讨会和持续学习活动的形式获得项目负责人的专业发展，这些活动涉及招聘，录取和指导来自不同背景的研究生。从第一年和第二年的每个项目中脱颖而出的领导者将被选中建立校园级团队，他们将在自己的校园内提供类似的教师对教师的学习机会。该项目的研究和评估活动涉及一个连续的多方法研究，包括有史以来第一次集群随机实验，以测试教师发展对三个结果的影响：博士课程使用的招生实践，录取队列的多样性和程序的选择性。该网络的结构允许可持续的收益，它与研究生教育的分散性及其不同的机构和学科背景相配合，而不是相反。研究生教育创新（IGE）计划的重点是研究生教育的研究。IGE的目标是试验、测试和验证研究生教育的创新方法，并产生将这些方法推广到更广泛的社区所需的知识。该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并被认为值得通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估来支持。

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.