Engaging undergraduates in research is a high impact practice shown to increase underrepresented students' persistence in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) fields and entry into research careers. The California State University Long Beach (CSULB) BUilding Infrastructure Leading to Diversity (BUILD) Scholars Program is a 2-year, upper-division research training program. Although similar research training programs exist, most admit relatively few students a year, primarily from the natural sciences. The BUILD award from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) allowed us to broaden research training to a wider range of health-related disciplines across four different colleges to have more even representation across the behavioral and biomedical science disciplines. Our Scholars Program builds upon best practices of programmatic mentoring, assets-based and cohort-based training, financial and educational support, and intensive research training by faculty in the students' disciplines. In this paper, we present the outcomes and evaluation of our training program with data from the first phase of the BUILD award (2015-2019). Findings demonstrate that our Scholars Program was effective at recruiting and retaining underrepresented students from a broad range of disciplines. Moreover, our trainees demonstrated a high level of research engagement through off-campus summer research experiences, conference presentations, and publications. The intensive training in the Scholars Program also yielded high graduate school acceptance rates for our trainees. Most importantly, our findings show that it is possible to broaden an intensive undergraduate research training program that is similarly effective for trainees across behavioral and biomedical disciplines, underrepresented minority status, and gender. While we highlight several elements of our training program, we emphasize these components likely work together interactively, and institutions wanting to establish a similar training program need to ensure sufficient resources for its successful implementation.
Cultural Mismatch Theory (CMT) suggests mismatch between interdependent home norms and independent school norms can hinder academic success for historically marginalized (HM) students who are more likely to be first-generation college students and underrepresented in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM). The effectiveness of a CMT intervention to increase science self-efficacy was tested among 213 (Mage = 22.99, SD = 5.74; 8.2% HM) STEM majors from a community college and baccalaureate-granting institution. CMT intervention students reported higher science self-efficacy relative to the control group. The findings support scalable CMT interventions to address STEM workforce disparities.
Colleges and universities nationwide have attempted to address the persistent demographic disparities in the health-related research workforce - particularly the lack of Black/African-American and Hispanic/Latinx researchers - by engaging traditionally underrepresented minority students in research early in their undergraduate academic careers. Previous efforts have focused on formal research training programs or course-based undergraduate research training, which commonly serve small student populations and are narrow in scope. With support from the NIH Building Infrastructure Leading to Diversity (BUILD) grant, California State University, Long Beach (CSULB) developed research-infused courses that introduce students to methods and skills for biomedical and behavioral research as well as enhance students' understanding of health disparities and the value of interdisciplinary approaches to solving problems. This study aims to identify promising pedagogical strategies and understand the extent to which students' ethnic minority status and formalized research training experience are associated with their perceptions of personal development gains and research and technical skills. Based on student survey data (N = 410) across three academic years, findings from this study indicate that research-infused courses have the potential to equitably engage students, regardless of their race/ethnicity and participation in formal research training. In addition, research-infused courses could potentially serve as a mechanism for colleges and universities to institutionalize opportunities for a broad range of students to be exposed to research methods and skills-building.
There is a broad need to support the early educational trajectories of underrepresented students pursuing behavioral and biomedical research, particularly at large, comprehensive institutions. The Building Infrastructure Leading to Diversity (BUILD) initiative at California State University Long Beach (CSULB) created an Associates Program designed to provide undergraduates with early exposure to research and foster a sense of belonging and interest in a research career during their sophomore year. Our Associates Program had high retention rates (> 90%) and served as a pathway to other research opportunities on campus, with over half of the students entering an intensive, upper-division research training program at CSULB upon completion. Analysis of evaluation data gathered at multiple points throughout the training program provided preliminary evidence that our early intervention program resulted in student trainees' growth in a number of key areas, including their sense of belong to the BUILD Program, interests in science and research, and understanding of what research entails and of the skills necessary for conducting research (e.g., scientific writing, oral presentation, data analysis). More importantly, comparisons of the students who continued on to an upper-division research training program to those who did not continue revealed that students who continued reported generally higher levels of science/research interests regardless of the time points of the survey, and a greater increase in their perception of gains made in some areas of research during the second half of the training program. Lastly, our results also showed that the Associates Program is similarly effective for trainees across behavioral and biomedical disciplines, underrepresented minority status, and gender. Based on these findings, we conclude that an early intervention program for undergraduate students results in development of research skills for students exploring research and serves as an effective pipeline for diverse students into more intensive upper-division training programs.
Research mentoring relationships are critical to mentees' persistence in STEM careers. Cultural identity variables (gender, race, ethnicity) influence how mentees experience mentoring relationships, including their developmental needs and expectations of mentors. Research shows that mentees from underrepresented groups in STEM often want to discuss topics related to race and ethnicity and how these factors impact their careers. However, many research mentors are uncertain of their ability to broach cultural diversity issues in mentorship, or in strategies to engage in culturally aware mentoring practices. To address this need, we developed an evidence-based mentor training intervention for Enhanced Cultural Awareness (ECA) in mentorship. We implemented this 2hr module online with research mentors (N=62) largely from well-represented racial/ethnic groups in STEM who were mentoring undergraduate researchers from underrepresented racial/ethnic groups. Mentors reported significant gains in skills, attitudes and behaviors related to cultural awareness in mentoring. The majority of mentors found the training valuable, and 97% of mentors reported intending to make changes in mentoring practices post intervention. Our results indicate that the ECA module is an effective tool to increase mentors' capacity to enact culturally aware mentoring practices. Implications for continued research and mentorship education to enhance mentors' cultural awareness are also discussed.
While much of the promotion for undergraduate research (UR) originates from the natural sciences, this high-impact practice should also occur in social science to prepare students for graduate school/ the workforce and should be integrated into lower-division general education courses. Our study examines content and skills gained by students from two course-based undergraduate research experiences (CUREs) in Introduction to Sociology courses. Pre- and post-course survey analyses, post-survey student outcomes of a CURE class compared against students enrolled in three non-CURE Introduction to Sociology classes, and a content analysis of end-of-semester papers indicate student knowledge gain in specific topical areas, methodological skills, and major sociology theoretical perspectives. We conclude that UR enhances research- and sociology-related knowledge.
One of the key challenges many peer-to-peer mentoring programs face is the lack of high-quality mentor training. In order to address this issue, the BUILDing SCHOLARS (BUILD) program at The University of Texas at El Paso (UTEP) implements a structured peer mentor training and provides the training to BUILD fellows at UTEP for four academic years. This paper focuses on introducing the BUILD Peer Mentor Training (BPMT) model and investigates its impacts on students using program evaluation data. Our results reveal that BUILD peer mentors were satisfied with the BPMT and their relationships with the mentees. They also reported that the training greatly improved their problem solving and action planning skills, and slightly improved their communication skills and ability to assess a mentee's understanding. Finally, four practical recommendations are provided for institutions and programs that might be interested in implementing a similar peer mentor training.
The articles in this special issue provide insights from a variety of mentoring interventions that were implemented across the NIH Diversity Program Consortium (DPC). Many of the articles highlight examples of how the Entering Mentoring and Entering Research curricular materials, available through the National Research Mentoring Network (NRMN), were adapted and implemented for research mentors and research trainees at Building Infrastructure Leading to Diversity (BUILD) institutions. Other articles report the outcomes of programs developed and offered more broadly by the NRMN. This overview provides background information on NIH DPC-wide efforts and the Entering Mentoring and Entering Research curricula.
The BUILD Mentoring Community (BMC) at California State University Long Beach (CSULB) was developed to enhance mentoring skills among our already experienced research faculty mentors. Designed in alignment with the published "Entering Mentoring" program, the 2015-2019 BMC trained 93 research mentors across 24 departments. Mentors discussed best practices in mentoring in a hybrid format during the first semester and completed a second semester independent project where refinements to their mentoring were piloted. Mentors were surveyed following BMC completion with a Qualtrics survey, and BMC-trained mentors (BMCT), BUILD non-BMC trained mentors (BNT), and non-BUILD (NB) faculty mentors and their students were surveyed using the Higher Education Research Institute (HERI) and Diversity Program Consortium (DPC) instruments. BMCT mentors found that the workload of the BMC was reasonable, and 86% of mentors would recommend the BMC. Most (97%) BMCT mentors stated that they were likely to make a change in their mentoring as a result of BMC participation. Both BMCT and BNT mentors rate mentoring undergraduates more highly, and present work with undergraduates more frequently, than NB mentors. Students perceive BMCT mentors as providing a better mentoring experience and being better at increasing motivation and confidence, setting expectations, and acknowledging contributions compared to the ratings of students without BMCT mentors. While students rated BMCT mentors better on many key skills taught in the BMC, some learning goals did not produce a difference, including discussing and valuing diversity, using active listening and constructive criticism, and employing communication strategies. Therefore, many aspects of mentor training at CSULB can improve. Overall, instituting online/hybrid mentor training enhanced mentoring skills even among experienced mentors, particularly when mentors were asked to apply and assess new mentoring practices as part of the program.
The California State University, Long Beach (CSULB) BUILDing Infrastructure Leading to Diversity (BUILD) program developed a near-peer mentoring component in which master's students serve as mentors for undergraduate research trainees in health-related disciplines, in addition to fulfilling teaching assistant duties. This paper has two parts. The first describes (a) the functions of this mentoring component, taking into consideration the context of CSULB; (b) the extensive year-round training curriculum for near-peer mentors; and (c) the evolution of this curriculum in response to feedback from BUILD trainees, near-peer mentors, and undergraduate research training instructors. The second part evaluates the effectiveness of the near-peer mentoring component, based on focus groups and quantitative surveys of both near-peer mentors and mentees. We offer recommendations for master's comprehensive research institutions interested in implementing near-peer mentoring within similar research training programs.
Models of persistence and success in undergraduate research training emphasize the importance of engagement and integration across social, educational, research, and career settings. Students are likely to benefit from multiple sources of mentoring to meet their multi-dimensional needs for support across these domains. As part of a comprehensive training initiative for traditionally underrepresented students aspiring to careers in biomedical research, BUILD EXITO implemented a multiple mentoring model matching each undergraduate scholar with a research mentor, a faculty mentor, and a peer mentor. By design, each mentor has a different functional role. The current study investigates whether the nature of support scholars actually receive differs by type of mentor. The data are activity records (n=11,756) generated from monthly logs on which scholars (n=223) indicated the form of support received from each mentor by selecting from several items (e.g. personal support, making connections, career advising). Analyses with repeated-measures ANOVA indicate that peer mentors are more likely to address scholars' personal lives, academic skills, and connections to campus programs and services. Career mentors focus on advising related to academics, academic progress, and careers. Research mentors, although also providing career advising and addressing personal life, primarily engage scholars in research-related training activities. The findings confirm that each type of mentor provides a distinctive pattern of support for undergraduate scholars, suggesting that students in comprehensive programs emphasizing academic success, research training, and career development may benefit from multiple sources of mentoring.
Toxicology, as a profession, lacks diversity. Undergraduate students, and especially underrepresented students, are not commonly introduced to toxicology at US colleges and universities. The Toxicology Mentoring and Skills Development Training Program (ToxMSDT) seeks to acquaint underrepresented undergraduates enrolled in STEM fields with toxicology fundamentals and skills to aid their entry into graduate programs and, ultimately, careers in toxicology. ToxMSDT is a collaboration among three universities. It is a year-long holistic training and mentoring program comprised of web resources accessible 24/7 and extensive one-to-one mentor-mentee interactions throughout the year. Evaluation of the two-year pilot program shows that students expressed a significant increase in knowledge about toxicology careers, networking with people involved in the field of toxicology, feelings of being part of the toxicology community, and seeing themselves as someone who will study toxicology, compared with their feelings prior to their participation in the ToxMSDT program. Thirty students have completed the ToxMSDT program and all 10 (100%) of those who have graduated have joined graduate school in toxicology or toxicology-related STEM fields. Of the 20 (66.6%) program alumni still enrolled as undergraduates, five (25%) are in the process of applying to graduate programs and medical schools as of August 2019.
The benefits of mentored undergraduate research to student success, retention, and persistence in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) have long been identified. However, many students miss out on the opportunity to engage in research often due to unfamiliarity of various research opportunities or how to approach potential research mentors. To address this, we developed a scalable online badge, Introduction to Research, that draws on aspects of the Entering Research curriculum (Branchaw, Pfund, & Rediske, 2010) to help students explore and prepare for undergraduate research in the biomedical and behavioral sciences. Students in the BUILD Training Program, part of the larger STEM BUILD at UMBC Initiative, completed the badge in conjunction with a 3-week classroom-based undergraduate research experience (CURE) before the start of their second year of undergraduate study at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC). We were interested in investigating how this intervention, online badge plus CURE, correlated to students engaging in undergraduate research before the end of their second year at UMBC. We did this through student self-report, comparing students who had participated in the online badge plus CURE (BTP) to those who participated in neither (Control). Our data demonstrate that students who participated in the Introduction to Research Badge and CURE entered into mentored research at a significantly higher rate than students who were exposed to neither. Further, previously validated instruments of students 'research self-efficacy and science identity were used to compare how the Introduction to Research Badge and CURE may impact these two psycho-social variables. Students who participated in the Introduction to Research Badge and CURE had significantly higher gains in research self-efficacy compared to the control group. However, no change was observed in science identity for either group. Collectively, our results suggest that students who engage in the Introduction to Research Badge in combination with a CURE engage in mentored research within a year of completion at higher levels than students who engage in neither.
Mastery of communication skills is critical to success in research careers. In this article we report on a study that focuses on a potential barrier to research career success that is virtually unstudied in academic interventions in higher education, specifically the possible effects of using a non-standard variety of English spoken by the student or trainee, often known as 'dialect'. The term 'dialect' is often used as a blanket term denoting any variety of a given language that is associated with a specific region, ethnicity, or social status. More specific terms used in sociolinguistics are 'dialect' for regional varieties (Southern, Midwestern, Appalachian) and 'sociolect' for ethnic, cultural, and class-based varieties. Here, we examine how these varieties influence scientific communication (SciComm) in the academic research training environment as well as the related perceptions of both trainees and their mentors. As part of a larger study, we surveyed 124 mentor/trainee dyads over 4 time points; for the present analysis, we included only those dyads where trainees reported a language variety (n = 139 English speakers or bilingual, (n=16)) and related to perceived comfort within the research environment as reported by respondents endorsing a non-standard home variety of English compared to their counterparts. We found that those trainees raised speaking non-standard dialects or sociolects ('home dialect') were more likely to report discomfort in the research environment compared to their counterparts who were raised speaking Standard Academic English (SAE) (regardless of ethnicity or social class). The speakers of non-standard varieties were not necessarily using those varieties in the research environment. The number of trainees reporting discomfort was higher than the number of trainees identifying as belonging to a minority ethnic group or first-generation status. In the same study, we evaluated matched mentors' perceptions of trainee performance and motivation in SciComm activities and found that mentors (without knowing the trainee's self-reported dialect or sociolect) perceived higher barriers to mentoring non-standard variety speakers on 3 items. Given these preliminary findings, we suggest that language variety may play an important role in mentor-mentee interactions in the research environment and speculate that it could be a more sensitive indicator of trainee's perceived and actual discomfort in academia than race-ethnicity or first-generation status. We discuss implications for both mentors and trainees, as well as potential interventions.
Scientific communication skills are critical to success in research science. Mentoring trainees, from undergraduate to postdoctoral and even junior faculty levels, has become an important research focus for transferring these skills. Our group has developed the Mentoring Practices Scale to assess mentoring behaviors toward trainees in the domains of general research (technical career, psychosocial) and scientific communication (writing, oral presentations, impromptu speaking/conversations about science and research). However, this scale, especially the Mentoring Practices Scale in Scientific Communication (MPS-SciComm), has not been assessed in trainee samples to determine whether the scale is reliable and valid. The purpose of the current study was to test the three factors of the scientific communication component of the scale among doctoral and postdoctoral trainees. Confirmatory factor analyses were performed on data from two samples of trainees (N1 = 510, and N2 = 185), and results verified the 3-factor structure. The 12-item MPS-SciComm demonstrated good internal consistency for each factor in both trainee samples. Scores were positively correlated with the variables self-efficacy and outcome expectations for scientific communication, as defined in social cognitive career theory, which have been predictive of trainees' research career intentions. Our findings suggest that the MPS-SciComm is a useful, reliable, and valid tool for measuring trainee perceptions of mentoring behaviors in scientific communication.
The popularity and effectiveness of intensive summer research programs to increase student self-efficacy is known. The Summer Research Institute (SRI) training experience, as part of undergraduate student training in Morgan State University's NIH BUILD program, uses an entrepreneurial approach to prepare students for careers in health-related research. Bandura's self-efficacy theory's (1977) four antecedents are represented in the SRI curriculum, which provides multiple opportunities for mastery experiences and for moments of roused feelings. These occurrences are accompanied by extensive multilayered mentoring, where the mentors provide verbal encouragement, and facilitate various modes of academic, psychosocial and institutional support. To our knowledge, student affect over time has not been tested to assess impact or program effectiveness in a summer research training program. This study is based on the qualitative assessment of bi-weekly journals of 28 students in the SRI. The practice of students consistently writing journals is aligned with the scaffolded knowledge integration framework proposed by Linn (1995). The journals were reviewed for their cumulative affective content and change over time. The students responded as expected with positive and negative affect throughout the program and ended with overwhelmingly positive affect with their concluding presentations. Using Linguistic Inquiry Word Count (LIWC), a text analysis program, we matched the fluctuations in affect to activities during the program and interpreted the changes for program assessment. This type of analysis opens a window into student affective responses to training components that, to our knowledge, have not been widely used for research training programs of this kind.
Self-efficacy, or an individual's belief in his or her ability to successfully complete a given task, is a significant predictor of outcome expectations, interests, career aspirations, and persistence among undergraduate students in STEM fields. Despite the central role that efficacy beliefs play in STEM career choice and persistence, few training opportunities have used theoretical models like social cognitive career theory (SCCT) to help mentors learn how to support trainee research self-efficacy. To address this gap, a mentor training intervention was developed to translate the research and theory behind self-efficacy and into the practice of mentoring in STEM. Evaluation data from mentors who participated in (N = 166) and facilitators who implemented (N = 7) a training based on SCCT were used to assess the effectiveness of such an intervention. Mentors reported high satisfaction and significant retrospective skill gains related to promoting trainee research self-efficacy. Mentors also reported changes that they intended to make in their mentoring. Facilitators with varying levels of familiarity with self-efficacy were able to implement the module effectively and provided additional suggestions for further improvement of the training.
Physician-scientist workforce size and diversity are issues of national concern (National Institutes of Health, 2014). It is expected that by increasing the diversity of this segment of the biomedical-research workforce, a broader range of novel biomedical and clinical research questions will emerge for studying disease risk and pathogenesis, improving treatment outcomes, and finding ways to reduce health disparities (National Institutes of Health, 2014; Oh et al., 2015; Tabak & Collins, 2011; Valantine & Collins, 2015) Strategies to address these concerns include increased funding for physicians’ participation in research during graduate medical education (GME), including residency and subspecialty fellowship training after medical-school graduation, and as grantees in “mentored-K,” careerdevelopment programs. These programs provide individual grantees the mentoring, salary support, and dedicated time to develop their program of research (Hall, Mills, & Lund, 2017; National Institutes of Health. Individual Mentored Career Development Awards Program Evaluation Working Group, 2011).
