IGE: Track 1: Overcoming Geographic Isolation with Research Communities

Peer-to-peer collaboration plays a vital and multifaceted role for PhD students: it helps students acquire new research skills and improve their publication records; it creates networks that provide professional support; and it helps students develop many of the key workplace skills for jobs both inside and outside of academia. Opportunities for building such research communities are severely limited or even nonexistent at small, geographically isolated institutions, where research groups are too small and specialized to lead to such collaborations, and where distance and geography limit contact with outside research groups.

This National Science Foundations Innovations of Graduate Education (IGE) award to the University of Hawai’i at Mānoa will pilot and investigate an innovative model for using designed research communities to overcome some of the professional challenges faced by mathematics PhD students at geographically isolated institutions.

The core idea is to form research communities for mathematics doctoral students at geographically isolated institutions via a semester-long mentored research experience and follow-up activities. This project will pilot the formation of three research communities over the course of the grant, each combining several students from the University of Hawai’i Mānoa Mathematics Ph.D. program with visiting students from other institutions.

To build a lasting community, the interactions will be multidimensional: the centerpiece will be an intensive, collaborative research project, but this will be buttressed by professional development related to teaching and outreach. This project will investigate the extent to which these designed research communities can provide some of the known benefits of peer-to-peer collaboration.

Specifically, the project will measure the effect of this intervention on short-term benefits (e.g., feelings of belonging, motivation) and long-term benefits (e.g., persistence, job placement rate). This model has the potential to lead to many innovative possibilities for graduate education at isolated locations.

The Innovations in Graduate Education (IGE) program is focused on research in graduate education. The goals of IGE are to study, 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.