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1. Work-in-Progress: The Design and Implementation of EFRI-Research Experience in Mentoring Catalyst Initiative Paper

   Qaqish, O. B. ( July 2021 , ASEE Annual Conference proceedings)

   null (Ed.)

   The National Science Foundation (NSF) Emerging Frontiers and Innovation (EFRI) Research Experience and Mentoring (REM) program nationally supports hands-on research and ongoing mentorship in STEM fields at various universities and colleges. The NSF EFRI-REM Mentoring Catalyst initiative was designed to build and train these robust, interactive research mentoring communities that are composed of faculty, postdoctoral associates and graduate student mentors, to broaden participation of underrepresented groups in STEM research who are funded through NSF EFRI-REM. This work-in-progress paper describes the first five years of this initiative, where interactive training programs were implemented from multiple frameworks of effective mentoring. Principal investigators, postdoctoral associates and graduate students are often expected to develop and establish mentoring plans without any formal training in how to be effective mentors. Since the start of this initiative, over 300 faculty, postdoctoral associates and graduate students have been trained on promising practices, strategies, and tools to enhance their research mentoring experiences. In addition to formal mentor training, opportunities to foster a community of practice with current mentors and past mentor training participants (sage mentors) were provided. During these interactions, promising mentoring practices were shared to benefit the mentors and the different mentoring populations that the EFRI-REMs serve. The community of practice connected a diverse group of institutions and faculty to help the EFRI-REM community in its goal of broadening participation across a range of STEM disciplines. Those institutions are then able to discuss, distill and disseminate best practices around the mentoring of participants through targeted mentored training beyond the EFRI-REM at their home institutions. Not only does the EFRI-REM Catalyst initiative focus on broadening participation via strategic training of research mentors, it also empowers mentees, including undergraduate and graduate students and postdoctoral associates, in their research experiences through an entering research undergraduate course and formal mentoring training workshops. Future expansion to other academic units (e.g., colleges, universities) builds on the research collaborations and the initiatives developed and presented in this work-in-progress paper. A long-term goal is to provide insights via collaborative meetings (e.g., webinars, presentations) for STEM and related faculty who are assembling an infrastructure (e.g., proposals for the ERFI-REM program) across a range of research structures. In summary, this work-in-progress paper provides a description of the design and implementation of this initiative, preliminary findings, expanding interactions to other NSF supported Engineering Research Centers, and the future directions of the EFRI-REM Mentoring Catalyst initiative. 

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2. A Change Model that Helps Faculty Mentor Underrepresented Minorities (URM) Doctoral Students for the STEM Professoriate

   Grasso, M and ( January 2020 , The chronicle of mentoring coaching)

   In response to the well-documented themes of unique challenges URM doctoral student experience (tokenism, stereotyping, microaggressions, etc.), faculty mentoring remains an especially critical resource to change the trajectory for URM students in graduate education. The purpose of this study is to examine the frst two years of change in institutional culture which will increase the number of URM doctoral students who pursue the STEM professoriate. The primary research question asked is “Can a focus on developing and mentoring faculty catalyze change in the culture and practices of their doctoral programs to increase faculty diversity?” Based on the idea that faculty are drivers of lasting institutional change, three diverse public universities collaborate to adapt and implement an institutional change project, called “AGEP-NC Alliance: A Change Model for Doctoral to Faculty Diversity in STEM,” that prioritizes cultural frameworks for deep change in postsecondary education (Gumpertz et al., 2019). Key model components include faculty learning communities; use of national faculty mentoring networks; and use of institutional diversity data. Culturally relevant mentoring is among several approaches of interest to STEM reformers to shift the focus to institutional-level change and not student defciencies. Operationalized as “cultural integrity,” the approach calls upon students’ racial and ethnic backgrounds as assets for reform in pedagogies and learning activities, while valuing those backgrounds as critical ingredients for acquiring academic capital and career success (Tierney, 1999). Kezar’s (2018) cultural framework for institutional change emphasizes knowledge formation in context as well as analysis of espoused meaning and values organizational members maintain. The researchers present the AGEP-NC Alliance as a narrative, rich case study and collaborative mentoring model, an approach allowing participant researchers to detail sustained data use in collaborative social interaction (Patton, 1990). Results will be shared that highlight faculty as cultural change agents, and organizational learning as a cultural process. Preliminary results show evidence of institutional change at several levels from classroom and laboratory practices to key departmental policies. 

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3. A Change Model that Helps Faculty Mentor Underrepresented Minorities (URM) Doctoral Students for the STEM Professoriate

   Grasso, M ; Campbell, CD. ( December 2020 , The chronicle of mentoring coaching)

   In response to the well-documented themes of unique challenges URM doctoral student experience (tokenism, stereotyping, microaggressions, etc.), faculty mentoring remains an especially critical resource to change the trajectory for URM students in graduate education. The purpose of this study is to examine the first two years of change in institutional culture which will increase the number of URM doctoral students who pursue the STEM professoriate. The primary research question asked is “Can a focus on developing and mentoring faculty catalyze change in the culture and practices of their doctoral programs to increase faculty diversity?” Based on the idea that faculty are drivers of lasting institutional change, three diverse public universities collaborate to adapt and implement an institutional change project, called “AGEP-NC Alliance: A Change Model for Doctoral to Faculty Diversity in STEM,” that prioritizes cultural frameworks for deep change in postsecondary education (Gumpertz et al., 2019). Key model components include faculty learning communities; use of national faculty mentoring networks; and use of institutional diversity data. Culturally relevant mentoring is among several approaches of interest to STEM reformers to shift the focus to institutional-level change and not student deficiencies. Operationalized as “cultural integrity,” the approach calls upon students’ racial and ethnic backgrounds as assets for reform in pedagogies and learning activities, while valuing those backgrounds as critical ingredients for acquiring academic capital and career success (Tierney, 1999). Kezar’s (2018) cultural framework for institutional change emphasizes knowledge formation in context as well as analysis of espoused meaning and values organizational members maintain. The researchers present the AGEP-NC Alliance as a narrative, rich case study and collaborative mentoring model, an approach allowing participant researchers to detail sustained data use in collaborative social interaction (Patton, 1990). Results will be shared that highlight faculty as cultural change agents, and organizational learning as a cultural process. Preliminary results show evidence of institutional change at several levels from classroom and laboratory practices to key departmental policies. 

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4. Teaching during a pandemic: Using high‐impact writing assignments to balance rigor, engagement, flexibility, and workload

   https://doi.org/10.1002/ece3.6776  

   Reynolds, Julie A. ; Cai, Victor ; Choi, Julia ; Faller, Sarah ; Hu, Meghan ; Kozhumam, Arthi ; Schwartzman, Jonathan ; Vohra, Ananya ( October 2020 , Ecology and Evolution)

   The COVID‐19 pandemic has created new challenges for instructors who seek high‐impact educational practices that can be facilitated online without creating excessive burdens with technology, grading, or enforcement of honor codes. These practices must also account for the possibility that some students may need to join courses asynchronously and have limited or unreliable connectivity. Of the American Association of Colleges and University's list of 11 high‐impact educational practices, writing‐intensive courses may be the easiest for science faculty to adopt during these difficult times. Not only can writing assignments promote conceptual learning, they can also deepen student engagement with the subject matter and with each other. Furthermore, writing assignments can be incredibly flexible in terms of how they are implemented online and can be designed to reduce the possibility of cheating and plagiarism. To accelerate the adoption of writing pedagogies, we summarize evidence‐based characteristics of effective writing assignments and offer a sample writing assignment from an introductory ecology course. We then suggest five strategies to help instructors manage their workload. Although the details of the sample assignment may be particular to our course, this framework is general enough to be adapted to most science courses, including those taught in‐person, those taught online, and those that must be able to switch quickly between the two.

    

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5. Impacts Resulting from a Large-Scale First-Year Engineering and Computer Science Program on Students’ Successful Persistence Toward Degree Completion

   Ragusa, Gisele ; Allen, Emily L. ; Menezes, Gustavo B. ( June 2020 , ASEE Annual Conference Proceedings 2020)

   There is a critical need for more students with engineering and computer science majors to enter into, persist in, and graduate from four-year postsecondary institutions. Increasing the diversity of the workforce by inclusive practices in engineering and science is also a profound identified need. According to national statistics, the largest groups of underrepresented minority students in engineering and science attend U.S. public higher education institutions. Most often, a large proportion of these students come to colleges and universities with unique challenges and needs, and are more likely to be first in their family to attend college. In response to these needs, engineering education researchers and practitioners have developed, implemented and assessed interventions to provide support and help students succeed in college, particularly in their first year. These interventions typically target relatively small cohorts of students and can be managed by a small number of faculty and staff. In this paper, we report on “work in progress” research in a large-scale, first-year engineering and computer science intervention program at a public, comprehensive university using multivariate comparative statistical approaches. Large-scale intervention programs are especially relevant to minority serving institutions that prepare growing numbers of students who are first in their family to attend college and who are also under-resourced, financially. These students most often encounter academic difficulties and come to higher education with challenging experiences and backgrounds. Our studied first-year intervention program, first piloted in 2015, is now in its 5th year of implementation. Its intervention components include: (a) first-year block schedules, (b) project-based introductory engineering and computer science courses, (c) an introduction to mechanics course, which provides students with the foundation needed to succeed in a traditional physics sequence, and (d) peer-led supplemental instruction workshops for calculus, physics and chemistry courses. This intervention study responds to three research questions: (1) What role does the first-year intervention’s components play in students’ persistence in engineering and computer science majors across undergraduate program years? (2) What role do particular pedagogical and cocurricular support structures play in students’ successes? And (3) What role do various student socio-demographic and experiential factors play in the effectiveness of first-year interventions? To address these research questions and therefore determine the formative impact of the firstyear engineering and computer science program on which we are conducting research, we have collected diverse student data including grade point averages, concept inventory scores, and data from a multi-dimensional questionnaire that measures students’ use of support practices across their four to five years in their degree program, and diverse background information necessary to determine the impact of such factors on students’ persistence to degree. Background data includes students’ experiences prior to enrolling in college, their socio-demographic characteristics, and their college social capital throughout their higher education experience. For this research, we compared students who were enrolled in the first-year intervention program to those who were not enrolled in the first-year intervention. We have engaged in cross-sectional 2 data collection from students’ freshman through senior years and employed multivariate statistical analytical techniques on the collected student data. Results of these analyses were interesting and diverse. Generally, in terms of backgrounds, our research indicates that students’ parental education is positively related to their success in engineering and computer science across program years. Likewise, longitudinally (across program years), students’ college social capital predicted their academic success and persistence to degree. With regard to the study’s comparative research of the first-year intervention, our results indicate that students who were enrolled in the first-year intervention program as freshmen continued to use more support practices to assist them in academic success across their degree matriculation compared to students who were not in the first-year program. This suggests that the students continued to recognize the value of such supports as a consequence of having supports required as first-year students. In terms of students’ understanding of scientific or engineering-focused concepts, we found significant impact resulting from student support practices that were academically focused. We also found that enrolling in the first-year intervention was a significant predictor of the time that students spent preparing for classes and ultimately their grade point average, especially in STEM subjects across students’ years in college. In summary, we found that the studied first-year intervention program has longitudinal, positive impacts on students’ success as they navigate through their undergraduate experiences toward engineering and computer science degrees. 

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