Bianca Bernstein - US grants

The Lucile B. Kaufman Scholars program is designed to encourage undergraduate women in engineering to pursue graduate degrees in engineering. The program will include 20 nominees and 8 alternates with junior status in engineering. The program builds on two components: professional development and community building. The professional development component includes an 8 - week summer research experience, culminating in a formal research symposia. The community building component includes mentoring and networking events designed to create a supportive community environment for participants. Mentors will also participate in diversity training workshops. Students completing academic year activities in the program are awarded the title Lucile B. Kaufman Scholar," receive a $500.00 scholarship, and participate in the summer research experience, for which they receive a $1500 stipend. Participant scholars achievements will be compared to a comparative cadre of non-participant, but similarly motivated students

Intellectual Merit
The study is addressing the question of whether deliberate resilience training "delivered via the Internet" can strengthen women doctoral students' persistence in physical sciences, engineering and mathematics, fields where women display high rates of attrition even as their numbers in doctoral programs have continued to rise. An internet-based, multimedia-enhanced program is being developed and evaluated for its effectiveness in reducing attrition and strengthening career aspirations and personal skills of female doctoral students in selected fields at multiple universities. Grounded in the literatures of career development, self-efficacy, and empirically supported interventions and instructional tools, the set of personal and psychosocial skills are addressed as "resilience skills" and the psycho-educational strategy to strengthen these skills as "resilience training."
The courseware is designed to inoculate participants against documented interpersonal, climate, and role challenges women face in male-dominated STEM fields. It uses interactive critical incident technology to create an audio-visual library of narratives by prominent senior women scientists and engineers who have handled such situations successfully. It provides training in specific coping skills, including decision-making, problem solving, cognitive restructuring, conflict management, negotiation, and communication.
Based on comparisons both with control conditions and estimated persistence baselines by discipline, the training will be evaluated on measures of personal competence such as coping self-efficacy and interpersonal skills, reports of intentions to achieve the doctorate and enter STEM careers, and records of academic persistence and degree completion. An expert advisory council drawn from the national science, engineering, and educational research communities is augmenting the expertise of the PIs.
Broader Impacts
This project is providing a potential new tool for broadening participation among women seriously under-represented in STEM. It has the potential to reach all of the thousands of women who are in STEM doctoral programs across the nation. Evidence of effectiveness will inform practice for IGERTS and other doctoral reform initiatives. More broadly research results will be disseminated through professional and disciplinary associations such as the ASEE, AWIS, WEPAN, SWE, American Psychological Association, American Psychological Society, American Educational Research Association, and Council of Graduate Schools, and through National Academy networks and those associated with IGERT, PFF, and CID, and through publications in appropriate journals such as Journal of Engineering Education, Journal of Women and Minorities in Science and Engineering, the Psychology of Women Quarterly, and the Journal of Higher Education. This web-based intervention is easily and inexpensively scalable, and capable of adaptation.

CareerWise-II is a continuation of CareerWise-I [supported by DRL 0634519]. This is a research project testing the efficacy of resiliency training over the Internet for the benefit of female doctoral students in engineering and the physical sciences, in order to reduce their attrition from their doctoral programs. The central research question is whether deliberate resilience training delivered via the Internet can strengthen women students' persistence and success in STEM doctoral programs.

CareerWise-II identifies five research questions:
1. What is the relationship between interpersonal communication skills and student perception of supports / barriers to degree completion / STEM careers?
2. What is the most effective approach for delivering online instruction in interpersonal skills for STEM doctoral students?
3. Do instructional design principles that guide the development of non-interactive multimodal learning environments generalize to interactive, web-based environments?
4. Do principles of instructional design derived from more structured domains (math, science) generalize to training soft skills (interpersonal communication)?
5. Does systematic resilience training over the Internet strengthen women students' persistence?
The focus of CW-II will be on usability testing, large scale testing (including recruiting students), and improved Internet interfaces, including simulations. The research design is comprised of three phases, each testing the effectiveness of different materials or combinations of materials. Each phase has randomized trials.