The Michigan AGEP Alliance for Transformation (MAA) was created in response to the NSF's Alliances for Graduate Education and the Professoriate (AGEP) program solicitation (NSF 12-554) for the AGEP-Transformation (AGEP-T) track. The AGEP-T track targets strategic alliances of institutions and organizations to develop, implement, and study innovative evidence-based models and standards for STEM graduate education, postdoctoral training, and academic STEM career preparation that eliminate or mitigate negative factors and promote positive practices for underrepresented. The Michigan AGEP Alliance for Transformation (MAA): Mentoring and Community Building to Accelerate Successful Progression into the Professoriate represents a collaboration between the University of Michigan, Michigan State University, Michigan Technological University, Wayne State University, and Western Michigan University.
The long-term vision and planned outcome of MAA is to increase the success U.S. citizens who are underrepresented minority (URM) graduate students and postdoctoral scholars in all fields of STEM through graduate study, postdoctoral training and the professoriate. This vision and outcome is being addressed by pursuing the following three overarching goals of the MAA: 1) Adapting two existing models, one for fostering multidisciplinary learning communities with diverse students and the other for improving faculty mentoring of URM graduate students and postdoctoral fellows, to the needs of the five MAA campuses; 2) Studying their effects on the academic identity and career progress of U.S. citizens who are URM graduate students and postdoctoral fellows in STEM programs; and 3) Implementing more widely on campuses those models that lead to improved academic outcomes and widespread institutional change.
The objectives for this project are: Objective 1: Designing, adapting and implementing evidence-based mentoring initiatives, on all five campuses, that are focused on improved mentoring for U.S. URM graduate students and postdoctoral fellows in all fields of STEM. Objective 2: Designing, adapting and implementing evidence-based initiatives to promote interdisciplinary learning communities, on all five campuses, that are focused on improved mentoring for U.S. URM STEM graduate students and postdoctoral fellows. Objective 3: Conducting research about the ways in which improved mentoring and improved sense of community are linked to a sense of academic identity, and the ways in which academic identity is linked to important academic and career outcomes, for U.S. URM graduate students and postdoctoral fellows in all STEM fields. Objective 4: Conducting research about the ways in which departmental and university variables moderate the relations among mentoring, community, academic identity and academic outcomes for U.S. citizens who are URM graduate students and postdoctoral fellows in all STEM disciplines.
The primary activities that contribute to the model for the alliance include: 1. Designing, adapting and implementing the University of Michigan's Mentoring Others Results in Excellence (MORE) model as a foundation for improving mentoring of U.S. URM graduate students and postdoctoral fellows in STEM. This includes training facilitators who run faculty mentoring workshops, conducting mentoring workshops, training advanced level students for intergenerational mentoring, and developing/distributing individualized mentoring agreements to faculty and STEM programs. 2. Designing, adapting and implementing the Michigan State University's interdisciplinary learning community model as a foundation for improving the sense of belonging, peer support and academic identify of U.S. URM graduate students and postdoctoral fellows in STEM. This includes training facilitators, conducting institution-specific community meetings, and holding MAA-wide community meetings for graduate students, postdoctoral fellows and faculty.
The MAA includes a social science research study that will explore the mechanisms that help explain the under-representation and attrition of URM students in STEM, as well as the contextual and individual factors that can promote academic persistence and success in those fields. The research team predicts that racial/ethnic stigma experiences in students' academic contexts lead to dis-identification from the academic discipline, which then leads to lower academic performance and completion. They also predict that contextual-level resources, such as high-quality mentoring, moderate these relationships. Examples of specific study hypotheses being tested include: 1. Students reporting more negative department diversity climates (stigma experiences) will report lower sense of belonging (affective indicator of academic identity) in their academic departments than students reporting positive diversity climates. 2. Students reporting having higher quality mentoring relationships with their faculty advisors will report more positive academic identity outcomes (higher perceived preparation, higher sense of belonging, higher curricular/professional involvement) than students reporting lower quality mentoring relationships. 3. Quality mentoring will moderate the association between stigma (e.g., reported negative department climate) and academic identity (e.g., reported sense of belonging), such that the negative association of negative department diversity climate with sense of belonging will be stronger for students reporting lower quality mentoring relative to those reporting higher quality mentoring.
