Graduate students are trained to write for discipline-specific journals, but they typically receive little instruction in communicating to public and non-specialist audiences. This lack of practical training persists despite the importance of engaging members of the public in scientific research to support policy decisions and science literacy. This National Science Foundation Research Traineeship (NRT) award in the Innovations in Graduate Education (IGE) Track to the University of Rhode Island will address this gap and promote students? scientific learning through communication and engagement. The model to be tested is a training program in academic and non-academic science writing for both graduate students and science faculty, which will include a series of courses, workshops, and internships, the development of a Graduate Science Writing Center, and an emphasis on a variety of writing projects. This project will contribute to the next generation of scientists who can communicate with other scientists and the public and will train a set of faculty who support students in that work.
The primary goal of this program is to work with graduate students and faculty to implement a new cross-disciplinary model of science communication training that integrates diverse types of science writing and communication from the beginning of and throughout graduate students' scientific training. A key to the training model offered is grounding in rhetoric, the academic discipline devoted to the persuasive power of language that includes studies of argument, public discourse, and civic engagement. The rhetorical approach will have three distinct features: habitual writing, multiple genres, and frequent review. Graduate students will write early and often to create a habit of writing. They will practice writing across multiple genres for academic and non-academic audiences. Graduate science writers will plan and draft their writing and then enter a process of review and revision in one-on-one and small group tutorials in classrooms, online peer review forums, and a Graduate Science Writing Center. Workshops for cohorts of Graduate Science Writing Fellows, Faculty Science Writing Fellows, and Faculty Science Writing Mentors will provide a rhetorical foundation and serve as a basis for individual, pedagogical, and curricular change. Faculty Fellows will be guided to adjust syllabi and writing projects for their graduate courses to incorporate more writing earlier in their courses and more opportunities for review and revision. Assessment of short-term and long-term student learning outcomes, writing tool adoption by faculty, programmatic outcomes, and project-level management will determine which components will be carried into the future and can serve as a model for similar programs.
The NSF Research Traineeship (NRT) Program is designed to encourage the development and implementation of bold, new, potentially transformative, and scalable models for STEM graduate education training. The Innovations in Graduate Education Track is dedicated solely to piloting, testing, and evaluating novel, innovative, and potentially transformative approaches to graduate education.
