Lori A. Snyder - US grants

The University of Oklahoma (OU) runs an ADVANCE PAID project tailored to the central states. The centerpiece of the activity is a biennial Big XII Workshop on Faculty Recruitment, Retention and Leadership. As a member of the Big XII Conference of Institutions of Higher Education, OU will invite each Big XII school (Baylor, Colorado, Iowa State, Kansas, Kansas State, Missouri, Nebraska, Oklahoma, Oklahoma State, Texas, Texas A&M and Texas Tech) to the new event in 2007, asking them to bring a team to OU to work on faculty recruitment, retention and leadership for their campus. Teams will be required to include administrators and STEM as well as Social Sciences faculty. The second workshop in Year 4, in the fall of 2009, will showcase the fruits of these teams' labors and reinforce the collaboration between the Big XII schools to address the issues of faculty recruitment, retention and leadership with a specific focus on the advancement of STEM women in academia.

The workshop activities will be centered on diversifying the faculty and building teams and strategies to promote members of underrepresented groups in the faculty and to positions of leadership. The special focus is on women in STEM disciplines, but the activities benefit all disciplines of these comprehensive universities. The workshop will make use of the best practices culled from current NSF ADVANCE Institutional Transformation (IT) programs, in particular those that have worked well at large public institutions with strong faculty governance. The workshops will dovetail with the adaptation and implementation of practices at OU to promote women in STEM disciplines, to help them succeed in academia and to move into positions of leadership.

The Intellectual Merit of the project is rapid dissemination and adaptation of best practices of the existing ADVANCE IT projects to twelve institutions in the central states, including three EPSCoR states, through two proposed Big XII workshops and through tailored programs on the OU campus for institutional change in advancing STEM women faculty in academia.

The Broader Impacts of the project include 1) a broadening of ethnic minorities involved in STEM academic endeavors, 2) outreach to women undergraduate and graduate students at all institutions of higher education in Oklahoma through the annual Women in Science Conference held at Langston University (a HBCU), 3) collaboration with government agencies in the region in diversity efforts and 4) outreach to Native American populations, specifically the Chickasaw Nation and the Society for Advancement of Chicanos and Native Americans in Science.

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Recent reports highlight a dramatic lack of diversity in both the clinical research (The National Research Council, 2006) and science and technology workforces (The National Research Council, 2011), with American Indian and Alaska Natives especially under-represented. Dramatic issues remain in attracting American Indian and Alaska Native students into behavioral and biomedical research careers. This project will examine factors that facilitate and impede academic perseverance and career achievement among American Indian students by tracking five cohorts of students to test a longitudinal model of Social Cognitive Career Theory (Lent, Brown, & Hackett, 1994). Factors explored as predictors of academic and career success include personal and contextual inputs, learning experiences, self-efficacy expectations, and outcome expectations as predictors of interest in, goals set, and actions taken to achieve behavioral and biomedical research careers. The project also aims to examine differences in important factors predicting success in academic perseverance and career attainment for American Indian behavioral and biomedical science majors versus American Indian non-science majors. Finally, the project aims to examine pathways by which American Indian students enter a research-intensive institution of higher educations. These efforts are intended to provide substantial information upon which interventions can be based, to increase the participation and perseverance of American Indian students in education and job-seeking within biomedical and behavioral science research.

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Recent reports highlight a dramatic lack of diversity in both the clinical research (The National Research Council, 2006) and science and technology workforces (The National Research Council, 2011), with American Indian and Alaska Natives especially under-represented. Dramatic issues remain in attracting American Indian and Alaska Native students into behavioral and biomedical research careers. This project will examine factors that facilitate and impede academic perseverance and career achievement among American Indian students by tracking five cohorts of students to test a longitudinal model of Social Cognitive Career Theory (Lent, Brown, & Hackett, 1994). Factors explored as predictors of academic and career success include personal and contextual inputs, learning experiences, self-efficacy expectations, and outcome expectations as predictors of interest in, goals set, and actions taken to achieve behavioral and biomedical research careers. The project also aims to examine differences in important factors predicting success in academic perseverance and career attainment for American Indian behavioral and biomedical science majors versus American Indian non-science majors. Finally, the project aims to examine pathways by which American Indian students enter a research-intensive institution of higher educations. These efforts are intended to provide substantial information upon which interventions can be based, to increase the participation and perseverance of American Indian students in education and job-seeking within biomedical and behavioral science research.

Project Abstract Even compared to other underrepresented groups, the American Indian and Alaska Native (AIAN) population is not well represented in STEM and disappointingly, are not always detailed in comparisons of workforce data because of their small numbers. Interventions to address risk factors of AIAN students have frequently been atheoretical, lacking in systematic evaluation, and developed without focus on explicit cultural terms that enable students to create a positive bicultural identity as scientists. The most recent data from Diverse Issues in Higher Education underscores the unique role of the University of Oklahoma in the higher education of American Indian students, as one of the top institutions in the nation in terms of the highest number of American Indian bachelors? degree recipients. Thus, this proposal provides several points of innovation with regard to prediction of academic perseverance and career success in biomedical and behavioral research careers among AIAN students, building on a previous NIGMS-supported study using Social Cognitive Career Theory. The current proposal aims to collect additional longitudinal survey data on AIAN and comparison group participants to establish full sets undergraduate experience and graduation information on several cohorts of students and to comprehensively analyze the time-variant factors in this data. In addition, this proposal explores the unique concerns of AIAN students through qualitative and quantitative methods in order to determine their potential as levers of change in policy as well as development of programming to increase engagement and persistence in STEM majors, with the intention of developing and evaluating the effectiveness of these activities in a future grant proposal. The goal of increasing the number of AIAN STEM majors and AIAN biomedical/behavioral research scientists would benefit from additional context to create a more sustainable outcome that considers the intersection between student interests and ability, community needs, and industry skill gaps. Thus, this project will seek input from a Tribal Education Alliance composed of tribal education departments and other tribal professionals, industry groups in proximity to areas with high AIAN populations, and continued discussions with AIAN undergraduate and graduate students. Our needs assessment will address the question of gaps between student skills and education and the needs of tribal and Oklahoma employers in STEM fields. These efforts are intended as a basis on which future funding proposals will be written to pilot and evaluate interventions at the focal institution, with the goal of ultimately scaling these interventions to other institutions, including higher education, K-12, and tribal communities, as appropriate.

This EAGER proposal aims to identify, empower, and reward diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) champions within the geosciences by aligning hiring, promotion, award, and other evaluation systems with goals to promote diversity and inclusion within the field. The PIs will work with the Southwest Center for Human Relations Studies (SWCHRS) to learn from and work with national leaders in diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives in higher education to revise and re-envision evaluation and reward structures within academic units that recruit and train the next generations of geoscientists. PIs propose the following workplan to achieve project goals: 1) Collect DEI data from geoscience departments nationwide to capture a baseline. 2) Interview faculty in focus departments and survey geoscience programs nationally to establish how faculty are currently evaluated in geoscience departments; determine how DEI efforts fit within evaluation, tenure, promotion, and award frameworks; assess faculty attitudes on the value of DEI work; and identify barriers to engaging in and rewarding DEI efforts. 3) Work with expert consultants to develop example evaluation and reward structures that explicitly value DEI work that can be adopted/adapted by other geoscience departments. 4) Work with SWCHRS experts to develop and distribute two webinars focused on helping academic units explicitly value DEI efforts within hiring and evaluation systems. These webinars will be offered at no cost to the geoscience community. 5) Evaluate the impact of the webinars and faculty perceptions of revised evaluation systems that explicitly value and reward DEI efforts.

This project proposes to employ social science methods to study barriers that hinder diversity in geosciences. Outcomes from the research will inform the production of resources that PIs will widely and freely disseminate, using a website highlighting 1- example questions, assessment rubrics, and decision trees departments can use to explicitly value DEI knowledge, skills, efforts, and impact in faculty hiring, tenure, promotion, and annual evaluation processes; 2- national geoscience faculty diversity data; and 3-webinars to help geoscience departments clearly and effectively value DEI knowledge and efforts in faculty hiring and evaluation processes. These resources will catalyze development of a diverse, globally competitive STEM workforce and engage full participation of UR scholars in geoscience and positively impact URM/marginalized faculty and students by both valuing the knowledge gained through their lived experiences and encouraging more faculty from diverse backgrounds to engage in DEI efforts, thus dispersing the load and broadening the impact, while also rewarding those who engage in DEI work, including previously ?invisible? labor. The PIs will develop and share ways to reward faculty who engage in inclusive and active teaching practices, which have been shown to positively impact student learning across the board, while also closing the achievement gap for UR scholars and marginalized students.

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.