Scaling a Systems Approach to Inclusive Graduate Research Environments: A Track 2 Proposal to NSF's Innovations in Graduate Education (IGE) Program

This National Science Foundation Innovations in Graduate Education (IGE) Track 2 award to the Council of Graduate Schools (CGS) will test strategies for helping all students, and students underrepresented in graduate education in particular, to succeed in doctoral programs. Prior research at the University of California, Berkeley, has shown that underrepresented students were more likely to succeed and thrive in programs that clearly communicate expectations and rules and apply these rules consistently.

Working with a network of 10 universities and 60 doctoral programs, the CGS research team will examine whether this finding holds across a broader range of institutions and program types. The research and innovations tested in this project have the potential to improve educational and career outcomes for all graduate students in three important ways.

First, the project has the potential to broaden participation in the U.S. STEM workforce, improving outcomes for groups that have faced historical barriers to graduate degree completion. Second, the research and interventions tested in this project have the potential to improve the educational and career outcomes for all graduate students by creating greater transparency about the steps needed to successfully complete the PhD and transition to a STEM career.

Third, the project will provide the evidence needed for universities and the NSF to invest resources in the most high-impact practices for supporting degree completion and STEM career readiness and success.

This project seeks to validate and scale an institutional approach to supporting equitable outcomes within STEM doctoral programs led by researchers at the University of California, Berkeley (NSF Award 1954923). That project investigated how structures operate within doctoral program research environments and found a positive relationship between a high level of program structure and positive outcomes for minoritized students as measured by student reports of psychological wellbeing and metrics of academic performance.

The proposed project will test whether the findings of NSF Award 1954923 can be generalized across approximately 60 STEM graduate programs at 10 institutions. Using a mixed-method approach, the project team will 1) refine existing instruments and protocols for understanding the role of departmental structures, policies and norms on doctoral student belonging and success and adapt them to a multi-institutional study; 2) grant subawards to 10 institutions to collect data through common instruments and coordinated methods; 3) collect, clean and share benchmarking data with 10 participating institutions; 4) analyze aggregate data to understand the extent to which the positive relationship between structure and equity-related outcomes is generalizable across graduate programs in different STEM fields; 5) conduct focus groups with faculty and graduate students in doctoral programs to better understand gaps in faculty and student perceptions and experiences, based on the survey data; and 6) identify promising practices for collecting and using resulting data to support program-level and campus-wide interventions.

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.