NSF Award
2429370
This National Science Foundation Innovations in Graduate Education (IGE) Track 2 award to the University of Arizona will help to increase the success of students from diverse backgrounds in STEM through the creation, expansion, and assessment of the Graduate Communities for Academic Fellowship and Efficacy (Grad CAFE) program. The University of Arizona (UArizona) is a Research 1 (R1) doctoral degree-granting university, a Hispanic Serving Institution (HSI) and a public-land grant university with a goal to increase recruitment, retention, and completion among underrepresented doctoral students in STEM. Grad CAFE is a strengths-based, holistic, intersectional, interdisciplinary multi-tiered mentoring community that has the potential to transform how support underrepresented graduate scholars in STEM and beyond are supported by directly addressing three key issues: 1) decreased mental health and well-being among graduate students, 2) the local and national lack of diversity in STEM programs, and 3) gaps in retention and completion for underrepresented graduate students. Grad CAFE is different from other mentoring programs in several ways. Unlike most mentoring programs, Grad CAFE moves beyond traditional one-to-one mentoring to create a peer mentoring community within a multi-tiered mentoring program. Additionally, Grad CAFE provides more than specific discipline- or identity-focused mentoring to create an inclusive space for all marginalized identities to come together and build community. Finally, Grad CAFE is a multi-year program that students can join in their first or second year, complete their comprehensive exams and return as a community leader and provide near-peer mentoring for newer students while building their teaching, facilitation, curriculum, and leadership skills. Grad CAFE will provide a blueprint for creating and scaling up from a cohort of 72 students in the first year to 276 students in the fifth year without significantly increasing the time commitment for faculty and staff, providing an easily replicated model for other institutions to follow.<br/><br/>Grad CAFE seeks to identify evidence-based best practices for holistic, community-based support for supporting graduate students in STEM, particularly those from underrepresented backgrounds. The theoretical framework of Grad Cafe is based on Wai-Ling Packard’s (2016) factors impacting student persistence (capacity, interest, and belonging) using three of the four major components of HSI “servingness” (outcomes, experiences, and internal organizational dimensions) identified by Garcia et al. (2019). Grad CAFE is a multi-tiered mentoring program that spans the entire UArizona STEM ecosystem. The program consists of two co-directors, a team of community leaders (doctoral candidates who have successfully passed their comprehensive exams) and a cohort of peer mentors (first- and second-year doctoral scholars). Co-directors provide one-to-one mentoring and a trusted advisor outside of participants’ departments. Community leaders participate for one academic year and receive career development and leadership training and serve as peer mentors to each other as well as near-peer mentors to the peer mentors. Peer mentors participate for one semester and attend a one-hour a week student success seminar. All participants attend monthly small group peer mentoring community meetings and four whole-cohort Cafecito dinners per semester. Research seeks to identify through formative and summative assessments how Grad CAFE impacts underrepresented doctoral students in STEM at an R1 HSI. To measure the impact of the program the researchers will assess if participants report 1) a greater sense of capacity, 2) improved sense of self-efficacy, 3) greater sense of interest, 4) greater sense of belonging, 5) increased satisfaction, 6) higher retention rates, and 7) higher completion rates as compared to non-participants.<br/><br/>The Innovations in Graduate Education (IGE) program is focused on research in graduate education. The goals of IGE are to pilot, test and validate innovative approaches to graduate education and to generate the knowledge required to move these approaches into the broader community.<br/><br/>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.
