NSF Award
2411746
The United States’ global competitiveness in scientific and engineering fields depends on the readiness and empowerment of early-career STEM scholars. This project is important because failure is an inevitable part of both doing science and integrating into the scientific community, yet few resources exist to help graduate students normalize or cope with failure. Furthermore, graduate students are six times as likely to report depression and anxiety compared to the general population, constituting a graduate student mental health crisis. The project will begin with the creation of a repository of videos, Fail-Safe Science, in which established scientists describe specific instances when they experienced failure during graduate school. The researcher will examine the impact of the videos on STEM graduate students’ fear of failure. This project will also support the formation of the first national Postgraduate Mental Health Group which will focus on bettering mental health in academic science. <br/><br/>The goal of this project is to create and test the effectiveness of Fail-Safe Science videos on normalizing failure among science graduate students. Expectancy Value Theory posits that modeling success through the experiences of more senior scientists will promote self-efficacy and decrease fear of failure in graduate students. The development of the Fail-Safe Science repository is informed by Self-Determination Theory, which highlights the importance of integrating autonomy, competence, and relatedness to promote participant engagement. To examine the effectiveness of the videos, the research team will conduct participatory action research using semi-structured interviews with graduate students who identify as having anxiety and depression, probing how Fail-Safe Science impacts their fear of failure, self-efficacy, navigation of failures, coping skills, sense of belonging in science, and mental health. The resulting repository will be made freely available to all graduate students, with the hope that it will help bolster self-efficacy and sense of belonging amongst the diverse group of rising scientists.<br/><br/>This project is funded by the STEM Education Postdoctoral Research Fellowship (STEM Ed PRF) program that aims to enhance the research knowledge, skills, and practices of recent doctorates in STEM, STEM education, education, and related disciplines to advance their preparation to engage in fundamental and applied research that advances knowledge within the field.<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.
