2024 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

The objective of this work is to understand how a multidisciplinary undergraduate science communication fellowship impacts early-stage students' confidence and self-efficacy in research. The Grand Challenges Undergraduate Water Science Communication Fellowship was created at an R1 Hispanic-Serving University in the American Southwest in 2022 and is offered annually in the Spring. The purpose of the Fellowship is to broaden the participation of undergraduate students in research while exposing them to interdisciplinary perspectives. Students are paired with a mentor who is conducting a water-resource related study at the University and are tasked with creating a communication project based on the mentor’s work. Example communication projects include infographics, songs, paintings, posters, time-lapse graphs, 3-D models, ceramics, and animations. Projects are accompanied by an oral presentation, presented at the University’s Undergraduate Research Conference. Participating students and mentors came from diverse disciplinary backgrounds, including mechanical engineering, environmental science, political science, international studies, economics, environmental engineering, and computer science. Over the course of a 14-week Spring semester, the students met with their mentors on either a bi-weekly or monthly basis to become familiar with their work and met with a cohort of their peers weekly. Cohort meetings consisted of public speaking exercises, critiques of projects, and collaborative problem solving of issues that arose in individual projects. To determine the impact of the Fellowship on student’s self-efficacy, we conducted pre- and post- participation surveys. Likert-scaled questions were organized into three content groups: confidence, identity, and ownership as a researcher. The mean responses of the cohort were compared to determine if statistical changes occurred in these factors as a result of Fellowship participation. Results showed significant increases in the cumulative confidence responses with more than one standard error increase for the group following the conclusion of the Fellowship. Responses to the confidence block of the post survey questions were also void of any “very unconfident” and “unconfident” results, which were the two most intensely negative response choices offered within the survey. These results suggest that multidisciplinary undergraduate science communication fellowships with a cohort model may increase students’ confidence and self-efficacy in research. Other qualitative successes included participating students continuing their extracurricular involvement in career-focused work following the conclusion of the program. Some students continued their participation in their mentor’s study while others were able to find new projects, internships, and work opportunities through connections made during the program. The next step for this research study is to conduct interviews with the students from prior cohorts to gain additional insight into the potential broader impact of the program on student’s confidence within academia and in preparation for their future profession. We will continue to collect survey data on future cohorts to grow our data set and get a more comprehensive look at the impacts on student self-efficacy. Those outcomes will be used to scale and tailor the program to address additional research topics across disciplines at the University.