IGE: Track 1: Science to Policy: Operationalizing Knowledge from Education to Society (SPOKES)

The academy currently produces far more PhD graduates than can find jobs as professors. Additionally, few PhD advisors have been trained to provide mentorship for career paths that lead to destinations other than academic scholarship. This dual problem highlights the need for graduate student training programs that, as they leverage students’ research skills and technical knowledge, also prepare trainees for career paths beyond the university.

One such path leads towards the policy world, a professional milieu in which there is strong demand for early-career science professionals. Additionally, given the ways that policy so often sits at a convergence of scientific issues and key regional or national challenges, many STEM graduate students have a strong interest in policy work. Currently, however, there are few avenues for students to acquire the training that would prepare them for those careers.

This National Science Foundation Innovations in Graduate Education (IGE) award to the University of California, Riverside (UCR) will: (1) pilot a new version of UCR’s Science to Policy (S2P) certificate course that will incorporate a set of UCR-designed, science-policy learning modules; and (2) host a series of annual SPOKES Summits whose delegates will be policy professionals. These subject matter experts (SMEs) will collaborate with the SPOKES leadership to assess and refine the science-policy competencies that ground the certificate course’s training system.

These summits will culminate in the publication of the SPOKES Framework, which will establish a national standard for science-to-policy education. Thus, in addition to enabling S2P to improve the training it offers to UCR students, the project will also facilitate the SPOKES system’s dissemination to other institutions.

The SPOKES Project’s pilot course will be offered annually and will train PhD students from across UCR’s STEM fields. Each cohort will be trained in a set of science-policy competencies applicable to a variety of career paths (whether in policy, industry, or scholarly research). The SPOKES Competencies include knowledge of legislative processes, policy-directed research strategies, and science communication skills that cover a range of policy-relevant genres.

Those competencies will provide a framework for the development of the SPOKES learning modules, which will be incorporated into each year’s certificate course as they are developed. In parallel with these efforts, the SPOKES Project will: (1) assess the learning modules by engaging policy professionals as summit SMEs who will provide feedback on those modules’ effectiveness and relevance; (2) conduct qualitative portfolio assessments by soliciting the SMEs’ feedback on students’ written and oral work, (3) collaborate with SMEs to refine S2P’s science-policy competencies, and (4) publish those competencies, along with S2P’s training methods, as the SPOKES Framework.

Through their assessments of learning modules and portfolios, the SMEs will provide the feedback that will enable the SPOKES Project to refine all aspects of its training system. The SPOKES Framework will enable science-policy programs to arm their trainees with a powerful set of tools for engaging with and addressing some of our Nation’s most pressing challenges.

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.