IGE: Track 2: The California State University Wellbeing Alliance for Research Masters (CSU WARM)

This National Science Foundation Innovations in Graduate Education (IGE) Track 2 award creates the Wellbeing Alliance for Research Masters (WARM), a collaboration between four California State University (CSU) campuses. WARM examines how mental health and wellbeing relate to the academic success of students pursuing graduate degrees in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM).

With the decline in mental health across the United States, STEM graduate programs present significant challenges that can worsen students’ mental wellbeing. As a result, many students take too long to complete their graduate programs – or don’t finish at all. WARM uses an innovative app that can track mental wellbeing daily and automatically refer students to helpful resources when a concerning decline occurs.

WARM also supports groups of students on each participating CSU campus, who work with faculty from various academic fields to design and deliver interventions that support wellbeing. Some of these interventions teach the students how to better cope with their experiences; others remove unnecessary barriers to success that STEM graduate programs may present.

Wellbeing practices that WARM identifies as foundational to academic success are easily shared with other campuses, facilitating their adoption elsewhere.

WARM is guided by three general research questions. First, how do graduate program features relate to student wellbeing, psychosocial (or non-cognitive) variables, and academic success? The project will address this by auditing program practices and relevant campus resources, correlating them with academic performance, and with wellbeing and mental health as assessed by the app and surveys administered each semester.

Analyses disaggregate the results by key demographic variables (such as gender and first-generation status) and control for potential confounds. Second, how does engagement with the app impact graduate student wellbeing, psychosocial variables, and academic success? This involves pre/post analyses that examine how academic success indicators and survey responses vary after students begin using the app and how these metrics differ with the level of app utilization.

Third, how do targeted interventions affect wellbeing, psychosocial variables, and student success outcomes for graduate students? The project will answer this question with randomized control trials (RCTs) that compare intervention participants with a control group of non-participants, or quasi-experimental designs that control for selection biases and other potential confounds.

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.