FIRED UP: An immersive early field experience program to build community, support inclusivity, and foster large-scale research ideas

这个国家科学基金会研究生教育创新（IGE）奖给科罗拉多大学博尔德分校将测试一年级研究生课程的有效性，该课程旨在促进来自不同身份的学生的融入，并提供实地方法的学科特定培训。目前，生态学和进化生物学研究生课程在美国落后于其他生物学科在对等学生的代表性（人排除由于种族和种族）。该项目旨在解决这个问题的试点计划，旨在增加同行招聘，创建一个队列社区，提高学生的归属感，增加抢先体验的专家现场方法培训，并扩大培训，以解决有关全球环境变化的生态问题。生物多样性丧失和气候变化等与环境变化有关的重大问题需要一支由训练有素的生物学家组成的多样化工作队伍，他们可以跨学科合作，并提出以解决方案为导向的科学方法。虽然我们的计划是针对生态学和进化的学科，该计划的基本要素可以适应许多STEM学科，并扩大这种方法的影响。该项目的PI将通过与多个会议和网络，促进学生多样性的连接，努力增加对等研究生招生工作。研究生教育模式的设计借鉴了人类动机和个性的理论（自我决定理论和自我效能的来源），以满足心理需求，促进研究生院的幸福和成功：自主性，能力和相关性。通过提供早期沉浸式现场体验的学生队列的夏天之前，他们开始研究生院，我们的计划将致力于消除实地考察构成的障碍，对生态学感兴趣的同行学生，同时提供关键的早期培训和队列建设，以增加保留和学生的成功。该项目将利用完善的尼沃特岭长期生态研究（NWT LTER）计划和CU博尔德的山区研究站。该计划的评估将侧重于了解程序组件如何支持学生发展该领域的能力和分析方法，作为研究人员的自主性和独立性，以及该领域内的归属感。该项目旨在出版和传播各种STEM领域以及生态科学领域特定学科成果的方法。研究生教育创新（IGE）计划专注于研究生教育研究。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 Colorado Boulder will test the efficacy of a first-year graduate student program designed to promote the inclusion of students from diverse identities as well as provide discipline-specific training in field methods. Currently, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology graduate programs in the US lag behind other biological disciplines in the representation of PEER students (persons excluded due to ethnicity and race). This project aims to address this issue by piloting a program that aims to increase PEER recruitment, create a cohort community, improve the sense of belonging among students, increase early access to expert field methods training, and expand training to address ecological questions relevant to global environmental change. Challenging issues related to environmental change, such as biodiversity loss and climate change, require a diverse workforce of highly trained biologists who can collaborate across disciplines and produce solution-oriented scientific approaches. While our program is tailored to the disciplines of ecology and evolution, the basic elements of the program could be adapted to many STEM disciplines and broaden the impact of this approach.The PIs of this project will work to increase PEER graduate student recruitment efforts through connection with multiple conferences and networks that promote student diversity. The design of the graduate education model draws on theories of human motivation and personality (self-determination theory and sources of self-efficacy) to target psychological needs that, when satisfied, foster well-being and success in graduate school: autonomy, competence, and relatedness. By providing an early immersive field experience for a cohort of students the summer before they begin graduate school, our program will work to remove the barriers that fieldwork poses to PEER students interested in ecology while providing critical early-training and cohort building to increase retention and students’ success. The project will take advantage of the well-established Niwot Ridge Long-Term Ecological Research (NWT LTER) program and the Mountain Research Station at CU Boulder. Evaluation of the program will focus on understanding how programmatic components support students in developing competence in the field and analytical methods, autonomy and independence as researchers, and a sense of belonging within the field. The project aims to publish and disseminate the approaches used to be accessible for a variety of STEM fields in addition to the discipline-specific results in ecological science.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.