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

代表性不足的少数民族（URM）不到工程教师的10%，尽管占全国人口的近三分之一。一个共同的解释，他们的不成比例的代表性，在工程学院的水平，是与缺乏从其他教师获得有效的指导。这个NSF INCLUDES设计和开发启动试点项目将扩大一个新的指导和非营利网络范式，汇集两个利益相关者群体：（1）代表性不足的少数民族（URM）谁是工程教师和（2）备受推崇的（主要是非URM）emeriti/退休工程教师。一个先前资助的NSF项目发现，这种导师-学员配对被双方都认为是有利的，特别是URM工程学院。由于这些结果，调查人员建议通过创建国家基础设施网络合作伙伴来在更大范围内扩展，测试和评估该方法，以帮助提高为更多URM工程教师服务的能力，并引入远程指导和培训模式，为在偏远地理位置工作的URM教师提供服务，很少有导师。混合方法的研究设计，以获得更好的方式，其中URM教师和emeriti教师经验的项目所提供的机会的理解。此外，调查人员计划收集数据，以检查项目参与者如何感知和体验传统的直接沟通（例如，电话呼叫、电子邮件和面对面会议）与使用虚拟会话代理（ECA）的对比，虚拟会话代理是通过使用语言-非语言通道来模拟面对面体验，使用户参与实时对话的拟人化界面代理。该项目有可能扩大工程教授的参与，并为支持URM工程学院开辟新的可能性。

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.