RAPID: Graduate student experiences of support and stress during the COVID-19 pandemic

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RAPID: Understanding Graduate Student Experiences of Support and Stress During the COVID-19 Pandemic COVID-19 has rapidly upended graduate students’ learning, research, and teaching. Carefully crafted career paths that often require substantial investments by both students and their institutions have been placed at risk due to newly imposed challenges. These challenges include limited access to classrooms and labs, disruption to current and planned collaborations, increased stress and anxiety, and new responsibilities for children and other family members. This impact is particularly acute for graduate students with marginalized identities (e.g., students of color, low-income students) who are often already struggling with existing inequalities. To compound matters, these hardships confront a graduate student population that multiple studies suggest was already facing a mental health crisis. If graduate students do not feel supported during this critical period, the U.S. may suffer a dramatic decline in the effectiveness and inclusiveness of its graduate-level training, resulting in long-term negative impacts on the U.S. scientific knowledge base, society, and the broader U.S. economy. This National Science Foundation Rapid Response Research (RAPID) award to Montana State University, Iowa State University, and Texas A&M-Commerce will support research on: postsecondary institutional policies and practices that are designed to help graduate students feel supported during the COVID-19 pandemic and the influence of these efforts on graduate student educational and career decision-making. The study will contribute to a research base for graduate school administrators and faculty about how to immediately help graduate students during a crisis, as well as what strategies might be most effective for supporting graduate students in STEM fields and more broadly as they make degree and career-related decisions as society emerges from the crisis. The project is a multi-institution, two-phase explanatory mixed method study of graduate students’ experiences during the COVID-19 pandemic, their perceptions of institutional support, and near-term impact of this support on educational and career decision-making. The research team will leverage existing institutional higher education networks to solicit the participation of 15 institutions and disseminate questionnaires to 30,000 graduate students in late spring/early summer 2020. The research is informed by scholarship on trauma and disaster response. The survey, which will include validated trauma scales that measure post-traumatic stress disorder-like symptoms, anxiety, and depression, will be designed by an interdisciplinary team that includes trauma and mental health experts. Team members will then conduct virtual focus groups using semi-structured qualitative interview protocols to explore students’ experiences and reactions to the COVID-19 pandemic in-depth, and how these experiences relate to their identities, persistence, and career aspirations. Researchers will integrate both quantitative and qualitative data to further interpret, explain, and provide new insights to understanding graduate student experiences during the COVID-19 pandemic. Analyses will pay particular attention to student experiences related to race, class, gender, and other socio-demographic factors. Multiple efforts will be made at each stage to recruit and support participation of underrepresented minority STEM graduate students in the study. Results of the research will be disseminated through peer reviewed scholarship, a white paper, and workshops providing graduate college leadership and STEM faculty with research-based guidelines on how to support the broadest range of their graduate students during a time of crisis. This Rapid Response Research (RAPID) award is made by the Innovations in Graduate Education (IGE) program in the Division of Graduate Education/Directorate of Education and Human Resources using funds from the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act.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.