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Preface The symposium was conceived as an early celebration for the then-new Transformational Research and Excellence in Education (TREE) Award from Research Corporation for Science Advancement (http://rescorp.org/cottrellscholars/career-advancement-awards/tree-award). The TREE award recognizes the exceptional work in the integration of research and education of the pool of Cottrell Scholars. Within these volumes, we are pleased to have contributions from TREE award winners Rigoberto Hernandez, Vince Rotello, and Keivan Stassun. The diversity of their efforts and the broad impact of those programs highlights how highly successful researchers can have tremendous impact in education. Presentations at the symposium were made by Cottrell Scholars who earned that recognition from Research Corporation for Science Advancement by virtue of their early career ability to integrate research and education. Many Cottrell Scholars continue to push boundaries in their education and outreach work in addition to their research. That community has organized into the Cottrell Scholars Collaborative (CSC). This self-organized collection of Cottrell Scholars work together to identify and tackle high-priority educational projects of national importance, often in collaboration with partner organizations. Examples include the CSC New Faculty Workshop, a national workshop to help departmental teams develop teaching assistant training programs, and an academic leadership training institute. Several published monographs have resulted from work of the CSC teams including Teach Better, Save Time and Have More Fun (Beuning, Snyder and Scott 2014) and the Effective Evaluation of Teaching and Learning (Miller et al. 2015). Research Corporation for Science Advancement has made a financial commitment to many of the collaborative projects through small seed grants and by hosting an annual meeting at which scholars network, share insights, and identify new opportunities where a little effort can yield a big impact on the target population. Ultimately, the projects that Cottrell Scholars and CSC members develop start on the scale of an individual or two looking to impact their community. As new faculty seek to cultivate impactful projects for future CAREER grant submissions and their local institution, it seemed useful to provide a broader audience with the scope and scale of work from Cottrell Scholars and the Collaborative. Within this first volume, there are examples of an array of programs that focus on advances in education as well as improving representation, which are presented here because efforts are often synergistic in these two areas. Whereas some of these projects are complex in both scale and execution, other examples can be implemented immediately on campuses at little or no cost. ix Waterman and Feig; Educational and Outreach Projects from the Cottrell Scholars Collaborative Undergraduate and Graduate ... ACS Symposium Series; American Chemical Society: Washington, DC, 2017.
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A natural area in which faculty have significant control and potential impact is curriculum. While there are copious pushes and rationales for fundamental changes in science instruction, there are a myriad of possible activities from which students can benefit in the near and long term. Here, we provide examples of general changes as well as specific programs that target undergraduate and graduate students. Columbus and fellow Cottrell Scholars Hildreth and Leibovich outline lessons garnered from efforts to bring about curricular change in their respective departments, institutions, and disciplines (Chapter 1). They develop three broad themes, those of personal qualities, professional actions, and common steps across environments. On the issue of personal qualities, they highlight the requirement for perseverance and patience as is common in any process, as well as the critical need to exhibit leadership in advancing change. On the professional scale, they highlight the need to develop partnerships and networks that support objectives as well as essential considerations of new and on-going resources for any undertaking. Finally, they speak to the importance of timing and process among other common steps in affecting curricular change. Gruebele and coworkers described a now decade-old collaboration between the University of Illinois and Hanoi University to help modernize the chemistry curriculum at Hanoi University that simultaneously develops connections that bring internationally trained Vietnamese chemists back to Vietnam (Chapter 2). The curricular overhaul stemmed from Illinois faculty visits to Hanoi to teach a class and demonstrate effective instructional practices. Hanoi faculty also visited Illinois for extended periods to observe instruction and develop a transferable model implemented upon their return. Language, copyrights, and facilities were among the main challenges that the program faced. The program also included undergraduate research experiences, and Hanoi undergraduate students who had participated in the program were competitive for admission to the Illinois Ph. D. program. The partnership was judged successful on a range of measures, perhaps the most telling indicator was the high performance of Hanoi students in updated courses taken in Vietnam. Heemstra and coworkers tapped into the experience of a group of Cottrell Scholars (including the editors) in their development and implementation of Curriculum-based Undergraduate Research Experiences or CUREs (Chapter 3). The main descriptor of a CURE, as noted in the education literature, is that students engage in genuine research such that they have five critical features: scientific practices, discovery, relevance, collaboration, and iteration. The chapter describes some of the utility of CUREs in serving students in large programs as well as providing key skills or outcomes in any department. The authors provide a series of vignettes about their own CUREs, what those look like, and some of the key take-home lessons from their experiences. The result is a reference for a variety of fields, institution types, and levels. Banerjee, Fowler, and coworkers outline a revised approach to graduate education in the context of materials science (Chapter 4). Their educational plan not only centers on providing transferable skills that employers are seeking but also fosters the trappings of scientists who participate in and develop interdisciplinary collaboration. The development of the program arose from the x
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authors’ careful study of the literature, dialog with employers, and interviews with prior students from the Texas A & M program. The result is a multi-year, scaffolded program that provides outcomes for masters and Ph. D. students who develop technical skills, critical thinking, and communication skills that promote the desired outcomes. The architects have focused on their learning goals for students as well as developing a scalable and sustainable model. While assessment is forthcoming on this project, this overview provides perspective on the program design, motivation, and execution. Rotello describes an effort to transform graduate education in chemistry at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst (Chapter 5). Consensus regarding the content for the program was a challenge despite the ease with which faculty agreed on its over-arching goals. However, Rotello and colleagues implemented a “core course” in their program that was team-taught and represented the range of disciplines within the department. The core course demonstrated success by improving students’ progress through the graduate program overall, fostering skills that made program requirements more straightforward, and providing a solid grounding for research success. Rotello notes an unintended benefit of the reforms—a greater sense of community among the graduate students and within the department. These positive outcomes are proposed to result from the soft skills that are honed through proposal writing, a short research project, and paper review embedded in the curriculum as well as the supporting workshops on writing, ethics, and leadership. These successes have fueled the core course for two decades, but the future holds continuing evolution for the core course with the forthcoming implementation of modules in outcomes-based design and better assessment of student learning. Sciences continue to struggle to be more representative of the population, despite advances made in recent decades. The scope of the problem can be demoralizing, making solutions appear out of reach. However, these examples show well that a thoughtful, systematic approach to these issues can lead to not only positive but substantial improvements for underrepresented populations in a short period of time. Stassun describes the masters-to-Ph.D. bridge program developed in a collaboration between Fisk and Vanderbilt universities (Chapter 6). The bridge program is available by application to students entering master’s programs at Fisk. The admission to the bridge program minimizes emphasis on the standardize testing that often vexes students from underrepresented groups and emphasizes personal traits consistent with successful students such as persistence. At the core of the bridge program are research experiences, advising and mentoring from both Fisk and Vanderbilt, routine assessment by the program, and performance benchmarks for participants. The program is not a pathway to Vanderbilt admission, and bridge program participants must still apply for admission at Vanderbilt. The results of the 13-year-old program are astounding. Dozens of program participants have successfully completed their doctoral degrees (>80% competition rate), dwarfing the national output of Ph. D. recipients from underrepresented groups in astronomy and astrophysics. Shields and coworkers describe testing an intriguing hypothesis (Chapter 7): Can a successful pre-matriculation undergraduate research program be exported xi
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from a competitive, well-funded liberal arts college to a comprehensive public university with the same degree of success? In the early 2000s, Hamilton College developed a highly successful summer undergraduate research program that mapped well on to a highly research active faculty and campus. The result was increased success. Several years after that work, the team developed the first university-wide summer undergraduate research program at Armstrong State University with NSF STEP funding as well as a significant institutional commitment from the Dean of Armstrong’s College of Science and Technology. The result are staggering: Astronomical increases in undergraduate research overall as well as tremendous increases in retention and graduation rates among participants. While there have and continue to be significant challenges, the authors demonstrate that early, thoughtful intervention with research can have tremendous impact on students regardless of institution type. These projects represent breadth and depth across scales and domains. We hope that they provide some indication of the possible impact that one faculty member (or two!) can have on their community. Finally, mention of Research Corporation for Science Advancement in this introduction and throughout the volume is no coincidence. Research Corporation support through Cottrell Scholar awards, Cottrell Scholar Collaborative awards, and the networking that the Collaborative provides has enabled many of these projects and many more not contained in this volume. We, the authors and editors, are deeply grateful to Research Corporation for Science Advancement for its continued dedication to advancing science through education and research as well as support to our own individual efforts.
Rory Waterman Department of Chemistry University of Vermont Burlington, Vermont 05405, United States
[email protected] (e-mail)
Andrew Feig Department of Chemistry Wayne State University Detroit, Michigan 48202-3489, United States
[email protected] (e-mail)
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