Collaborative Research: IGE: Track 2: SciComm LIFT: Leveraging Institutional capacity for eFfective graduate student Training

Communication is the top job skill required across all sectors, and ethical science communication (scicomm) helps scientists identify and engage with the values, needs, and diverse ways of knowing of people ranging from community members to policy makers. Graduate students themselves have identified the need for training in these translational skills before embarking on their post-graduation careers.

Yet, most scientists receive no formal training in scicomm and report feeling ill-equipped to share science effectively. Scicomm training is not widely embraced in academia due to systemic barriers that impede and devalue both study and training in scicomm. Working at an unprecedented scale, SciComm LIFT will survey, train, and support thousands of graduate students -- across the country and across institution types -- for the top skills required by employers: oral and written communication and collaboration.

SciComm LIFT's emphasis on ethical scicomm training will also directly enhance graduate degree programs and professional development programs, ensuring early career scientists are more capable of doing and sharing science in ways that meet the needs of society and foster public trust in and of science.

SciComm LIFT uses expectancy values theory to address three issues: (1) most scicomm training programs prioritize knowledge gains and skills, but ignore the human/ethical elements of scicomm that are vital to science that fosters public trust; (2) existing scicomm training is rarely assessed, making it difficult for trainers and programs to optimize programming and demonstrate its efficacy; (3) long-standing, systemic barriers impede integration of ethical scicomm training. In Aim 1, SciComm LIFT will conduct a broadly distributed, systems-scoping survey (Motivations to Engage in Scicomm Advancement; MESA) of graduate students, faculty, and staff to (1) assess current knowledge, motivations, and self-efficacy around ethical scicomm and (2) quantify the extent of training addressing ethical dimensions of scicomm.

MESA will be made available to the research and graduate education community as a validated, reliable instrument tested across contexts and institutions. Aim 2 is a multi-institutional study to gauge the impact of three ethical scicomm interventions in graduate programs, which will provide much-needed data that can be used to calibrate scicomm training programs nationwide.

Aim 3 investigates how three levels of coaching can support academic faculty and staff to overcome institutional barriers preventing them from offering ethical scicomm training to graduate students. These aims will benefit society by preparing graduate students to bridge the divide between science and society through effective, ethical communication.

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.