The Changing Landscape of Doctoral Education in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics: PhD Students, Faculty Advisors, and Preferences for Varied Career Options.

The landscape of graduate science education is changing as efforts to diversify the professoriate have increased because academic faculty jobs at universities have grown scarce and more competitive. With this context as a backdrop, the present research examines the perceptions and career goals of advisors and advisees through surveys of PhD students (Study 1, N = 195) and faculty mentors (Study 2, N = 272) in science, technology, engineering, and math disciplines. Study 1 examined actual preferences and career goals of PhD students among three options: research careers, teaching careers, and non-academic careers in industry, and compared the actual preferences of students with what they perceived as being the normative preferences of faculty. Overall, students had mixed preferences but perceived that their advisors had a strong normative preference for research careers for them. Moreover, students who ranked research positions as most desirable felt the most belonging in their academic departments. Further analyses revealed no differences in career preferences as a function of underrepresented minority (URM) student status or first-generation (FG) status, but URM and FG students felt less belonging in their academic departments. Study 2 examined faculty preferences for different careers for their advisees, both in general and for current students in particular. While faculty advisors preferred students to go into research in general, when focusing on specific students, they saw their preferences as being closely aligned with the career preference of each PhD student. Faculty advisors did not perceive any difference in belonging between their students as a function of their URM status. Discrepancies between student and faculty perceptions may occur, in part, because faculty and students do not engage in sufficient discussions about the wider range of career options beyond academic research. Supporting this possibility, PhD students and faculty advisors reported feeling more comfortable discussing research careers with each other than either non-academic industry positions or teaching positions. Discussion centers on the implications of these findings for interpersonal and institutional efforts to foster diversity in the professoriate and to create open communication about career development.

An Ecological Approach to Evaluating Collaborative Practice in NSF Sponsored Partnership Projects: The SPARC Model.

From co-authored publications to sponsored projects involving multiple partner institutions, collaborative practice is an expected part of work in the academy. As evaluators of a National Science Foundation (NSF) Alliances for Graduate Education and the Professoriate (AGEP) grant awarded to four university partners in a large southern state, the authors recognized the increasing value of collaborative practice in the design, implementation, evaluation, and dissemination of findings in the partnership over time. When planning a program among partnering institutions, stakeholders may underestimate the need for, and value of, collaborative practice in facilitating partnership functioning. This method paper outlines an evaluative model to increase the use of collaborative practice in funded academic partnership programs. The model highlights collaborative practice across multiple stakeholder groups in the academic ecology: Sponsors of funded programs (S), Program partners and participants (P), Assessment and evaluation professionals (A), academic researchers (R), and the national and global Community (C). The SPARC model emphasizes evidence-based benefits of collaborative practice across multiple outcome domains. Tools and frameworks for evaluating collaborative practice take a view of optimizing partnership operational performance in achieving stated goals. Collaborative practice can also be an integral element of program activities that support the academic success and scholarly productivity, psychosocial adjustment, and physical and psychological well-being of stakeholders participating in the program. Given the goal of our alliance to promote diversification of the professoriate, the model highlights the use of collaborative practice in supporting stakeholders from groups historically underrepresented in STEM fields across these outcome domains. Using data from a mixed-methods program evaluation of our AGEP alliance over 4 years, the authors provide concrete examples of collaborative practice and their measurement. Results discuss important themes regarding collaborative practice that emerged in each stakeholder group. Authors operationalize the SPARC model with a checklist to assist program stakeholders in designing for and assessing collaborative practice in support of project goals in funded academic partnership projects, emphasizing the contributions of collaborative practice in promoting diversification of the professoriate.

Gene Annotation in High Schools: Successful Student Pipeline and Teacher Professional Development in Bioscience Using GENI-ACT.

Knowledge of genomics is an essential component of science for high school student health literacy. However, few high school teachers have received genomics training or any guidance on how to teach the subject to their students. This project explored the impact of a genomics and bioinformatics research pipeline for high school teachers and students using an introduction to genome annotation research as the catalyst. The Western New York-based project had three major components: (1) a summer teacher professional development workshop to introduce genome annotation research, (2) teacher-guided student genome annotation group projects during the school year, (3) with an end of the academic year capstone symposium to showcase student work in a poster session. Both teachers and students performed manual gene annotations using an online annotation toolkit known as Genomics Education National Initiative-Annotation Collaboration Toolkit (GENI-ACT), originally developed for use in a college undergraduate teaching environment. During the school year, students were asked to evaluate the data they had collected, formulate a hypothesis about the correctness of the computer pipeline annotation, and present the data to support their conclusions in poster form at the symposium. Evaluation of the project documented increased content knowledge in basic genomics and bioinformatics as well as increased confidence in using tools and the scientific process using GENI-ACT, thus demonstrating that high school students are capable of using the same tools as scientists to conduct a real-world research task.