Collaborative Research: EAGER: Using allies to expand your network: Implementing a psychological methodology to attract and retain underrepresented (UR) students in geoscience

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Geoscience maintains a base-rate problem with respect to diversity: ethnic minorities and people with disabilities are highly underrepresented. This has been traced to a variety of barriers for underrepresented (UR) ethnic scholars including: a lack of geoscience majors at HBCUs and primarily Hispanic-serving institutions, a lack of experience with, and time spent in, nature (e.g., 3% of visitors to U.S. national parks are Black and Hispanic), and negative attitudes about career prospects. For people with disabilities, the main challenge is accessibility and the provision of appropriate accommodations. UR individuals may self-select out of geoscience programs due to these perceptions and barriers. This project will test the idea that allies, or members of dominant social identities, are best situated to positively influence these statistics. Academic allies, whether faculty or graduate student teaching assistants, have tremendous impact on their students’ academic engagement and can serve as linchpins for improving the future trajectories of UR students. PIs will train individuals in effective allyship behaviors, and incentivize them to recruit UR students into their academic field trips. The PIs plan to target allies who engage in field research and education, as geoscience is a unique STEM field insofar as much of the data collection and skill development are practiced out in nature at locations around the world. The PIs propose testing a strategy to overcome barriers in this context for UR students, as positive (or negative) experiences in field settings have profound impacts on recruitment and retention.This project will facilitate training and assessment of approximately 80 academic allies and measure the effect of that training on allies as well as hundreds of majority and UR students. The expectation is that the training will produce a secondary effect: academic allies role model effective behaviors to all of their students and faculty networks, creating a “train-the-trainer” ripple effect. The PIs will use academic field trips as a vehicle for measurement, including multisource ratings, applying 360-degree-type ratings typically collected in performance appraisals to this setting. Deliverables include an experimental, longitudinal (over time), and multisource analysis of the allyship program and its improvement of allyship-related attitudes and behaviors, as well as its impact on the performance of UR students. These results will inform research efforts regarding the effectiveness of implemented strategies, and the materials and procedure will be made open-source for maximum replicability. A capstone conference will be used to disseminate findings to all participating allies and UR students, inform about methodologies that improve attraction and retention of UR groups in the geosciences, and expand UR networks.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.