Graduate STEM Education for the 21st Century

Leshner, Alan I.

doi:10.17226/25038

Cited by 96 publications

(88 citation statements)

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“…A recent report by the National Academies acknowledged that more than 94% of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) doctoral students teach or mentor undergraduates at some point during their degree programs. Yet the impact of these experiences on postgraduates’ personal and professional growth remains unclear (NASEM, 2018). There has been some work investigating the effects of teaching on graduate students (e.g., Feldon et al.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Volunteered or Voluntold? The Motivations and Perceived Outcomes of Graduate and Postdoctoral Mentors of Undergraduate Researchers

Limeri

Asif

Dolan

2019

LSE

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Graduate students and postdoctoral researchers (postgraduates) in the life sciences frequently mentor undergraduate researchers, especially at research universities. Yet there has been only modest investigation of this relationship from the postgraduate perspective. We conducted an exploratory study of the experiences of 32 postgraduate mentors from diverse institutions, life sciences disciplines, and types of research to examine their motivations for mentoring and their perceived outcomes. Although some postgraduates reported feeling pressured to mentor undergraduate researchers, all expressed personal motivations, including both agentic (self-focused) and communal (community-focused) motivations. These postgraduates reported benefits and costs of mentoring that had both vocational and psychosocial elements. Given that our results indicated that even postgraduates who engaged in mentoring at the request of their faculty advisors had their own motivations, we conducted a second phase of analysis to determine the extent to which our results aligned with different theories of motivation (self-determination theory, social cognitive career theory, expectancy-value theory, social exchange theory). We end by proposing a model of postgraduate mentoring of undergraduate researchers that integrates the theories supported by our findings.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Volunteered or Voluntold? The Motivations and Perceived Outcomes of Graduate and Postdoctoral Mentors of Undergraduate Researchers

Limeri

Asif

Dolan

2019

LSE

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“…Over the years, the gap between the number of PhDs in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) and available faculty positions has increased, with only 10-12% of STEM trainees transitioning to independent, tenuretrack research careers in academia (NASEM, 2018b). This has resulted in a declining interest in academic careers among trainees and an increasing demand for better, more comprehensive career and professional development resources from their training programs (Fuhrmann, 2016).…”

Section: Career and Professional Development Resourcesmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Currently, there is relatively little evaluation of the training provided by institutions in the United States, and there are few incentives to implement best practices. The National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM) and others have released multiple reports with recommendations on how to best rescue the academic training system from its flaws and crises (Alberts et al, 2014;NASEM, 2018a;NASEM, 2018b;NASEM, 2018c;NASEM, 2019). Unfortunately, a lack of buy-in by departmental and institutional leadership has led to no large-scale, concrete actions.…”

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confidence: 99%

Actionable recommendations from trainees to improve science training

Davis¹,

Singh

Weismann³

et al. 2020

eLife

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Over the past 20 years, a series of reports written by groups of senior researchers and administrators have recommended changes to improve the training environments for graduate students and postdoctoral researchers in the United States. However, academic institutions and departments have largely failed to implement these recommendations, which has exacerbated the problems faced by these trainees. Here, based on input from trainees at different career stages, we outline seven practical changes that academic institutions and departments can make to improve their training environments.

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“…In its recent report “Graduate STEM education for the 21 st Century”, The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, 2018 briefly outlined core competencies for STEM PhDs. In its formal recommendations specifically for STEM PhD education, the first recommendation is, “Universities should verify that every graduate program that they offer provides for these competencies and that students demonstrate that they have achieved them before receiving their doctoral degrees.” This assessment rubric provides one way for universities to verify that students have achieved the core competencies of a science PhD.…”

Section: Why Should Phd Training Incorporate a Competency-based Appromentioning

confidence: 99%

Competency-based assessment for the training of PhD students and early-career scientists

Verderame

Freedman

Kozlowski

et al. 2018

eLife

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The training of PhD students and early-career scientists is largely an apprenticeship in which the trainee associates with an expert to become an independent scientist. But when is a PhD student ready to graduate, a postdoctoral scholar ready for an independent position, or an early-career scientist ready for advanced responsibilities? Research training by apprenticeship does not uniformly include a framework to assess if the trainee is equipped with the complex knowledge, skills and attitudes required to be a successful scientist in the 21st century. To address this problem, we propose competency-based assessment throughout the continuum of training to evaluate more objectively the development of PhD students and early-career scientists.

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Graduate STEM Education for the 21st Century

Cited by 96 publications

References 0 publications

Volunteered or Voluntold? The Motivations and Perceived Outcomes of Graduate and Postdoctoral Mentors of Undergraduate Researchers

Volunteered or Voluntold? The Motivations and Perceived Outcomes of Graduate and Postdoctoral Mentors of Undergraduate Researchers

Actionable recommendations from trainees to improve science training

Competency-based assessment for the training of PhD students and early-career scientists

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