Response to Team Training for Team Science: Improving Interdisciplinary Collaboration

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1 Response to Team Training for Team Science: Improving Interdisciplinary Collaboration Maura Borrego, Department of Engineering Education, Virginia Tech, To complement this paper I d like to help attendees and the committee members think about how training research from work settings may translate to the ways we train junior scientists and engineers at the graduate and undergraduate level. The two primary settings I will discuss are laboratories/research groups and coursework. First, I will give a brief summary of what learning outcomes may be the focus of interdisciplinary training and education. At the end, I will point to some institutional barriers specific to interdisciplinary graduate education. Learning Outcomes, Learning Objectives, Goals, etc. What are teamwork skills? What does it mean for a researcher to be interdisciplinary, multidisciplinary or transdisciplinary? These are ongoing debates, but I want to offer some specific examples from synthesis of educational practice. First, I want to note that interdisciplinarity and similar terms are largely an artifact of how higher education institutions are organized. Unless students are pursuing a career in academia, touting interdisciplinary skills may not resonate with employers. The industrial and organizational psychology literature is rarely framed as cross-disciplinary because in industrial (and nonprofit or government) settings, working across organizations does not mean working across disciplines. So although crossdisciplinary team training is important, it may appear to be undervalued in the workplace. In an analysis of 130 funded proposals from the National Science Foundation s Integrative Graduate Education and Research Traineeship (IGERT) program (Borrego & Newswander, 2010), we found that science and engineering PIs described interdisciplinary goals for their graduate students along four themes: 1. Grounding in Multiple Traditional Disciplines 2. Integration Skills and Broad Perspective of the Interdisciplinary Domain Maura Borrego 1

2 3. Teamwork 4. Interdisciplinary Communication This analysis was compared to definitions and frameworks from interdisciplinary scholars in the humanities, and we found two important differences. First, it helped us realize that many scientists and engineers make the implicit assumption that interdisciplinarity means teamwork among researchers representing various disciplines. Second, we realized that scientists and engineers are not taking time to reflect on the contribution, challenges or limitations of interdisciplinary and disciplinary research approaches (at least not within the context of their research and graduate training processes) something which is emphasized in humanities discussions of interdisciplinary skills. In another analysis of 104 articles describing engineering student team projects (primarily undergraduate)(borrego, Karlin, McNair, & Beddoes, in press 2013), we found that faculty members used team projects to help students learn: teamwork, design, communication skills, innovation, life-long learning or self-directed learning, and ethics. Within the broad category of teamwork, specific related outcomes were global/cultural competence, project management, interdisciplinary teamwork, distributed teamwork, leadership, and time management. In particular, I want to point to cultural competence as an area of research that may particularly informative to team science and team training. Disciplines have been likened to cultures (Reich & Reich, 2006), and research in cultural competence has developed a means for being sensitive to cultural differences and developing communication and collaboration skills for developing common ground with new team members, clients, etc. Laboratory and Research Group Training For doctoral students in science and engineering, most of their research training occurs during the dissertation phase in a research group or lab setting. Most of the studies of how students, postdocs and faculty members interact and learn in this setting are ethnographic, focusing in depth on Maura Borrego 2

3 one or a few settings. For example, Kevin Dunbar s work has highlighted insights that interdisciplinary researchers offer each other during formal and informal group meetings through the use of analogies (Dunbar, 1999). Few studies use surveys or other methods to understand research training experiences of science and engineering doctoral students. Erin Crede and I used a survey methodology to understand how engineering graduate students in various sized research groups interact with peers and advisors to learn to conduct research (Crede & Borrego, 2012). An IGERT program evaluation reports 66% of IGERT trainees worked on a team research project, although it is not clear whether this was within a course, lab rotation or other research experience (Carney, Chawla, Wiley, & Young, 2006). For any group to be a team, they must be interdependent and working toward a mutual goal. These and other descriptions of research groups suggest that students are often interdependent in the sharing of equipment, facilities and supplies. They have a common broad goal which is the research theme of the group. However, the individualized nature of the PhD is a substantial barrier to developing team-based dissertation research (Boden, Borrego, & Newswander, 2011), because we do not have a widely accepted method for evaluating the individual contribution to a team project. Coursework Coursework is another means of training students at the graduate and undergraduate level in interdisciplinary teamwork. For example, 80% percent of successful IGERT proposals described coursework, such as creating new interdisciplinary graduate courses (Borrego & Cutler, 2010). Among the proposals providing details of how they would develop team skills in students, 50% described new courses, which typically included team projects. In our analysis of 104 articles describing engineering team projects (primarily undergraduate), we identified challenges most often cited and summarized the relevant literature from industrial and organizational psychology (Borrego, Karlin, et al., in press 2013). The most prominent challenge was the Maura Borrego 3

4 issue of social loafing, described by some of the authors as free-riders, or team members who do not contribute their fair share to the project. Conflict was also discussed more broadly. Engineering faculty wanted student team projects to proceed smoothly and efficiently. Their efforts were frequently directed at ensuring students manage their time, work together well, and each contribute their fair share of effort. In the psychology literature, this is referred to as team effectiveness, or the study of factors that influence a wide variety of team outcomes. This review article uses the challenges cited by these faculty members to motivate a summary of five constructs influencing team effectiveness, with an emphasis on implications on designing, facilitating and assessing team projects. The constructs 1 are: social loafing, interdependence, conflict, trust, and shared mental models. Institutional Barriers and Changes Finally, I would like to point to a forthcoming book chapter which discusses how a particular funding initiative has resulted in changes at educational institutions to support interdisciplinary team science (Borrego, Boden, et al., in press 2013). We interviewed administrators, faculty members and students at institutions with at least 4 NSF IGERT grants. The faculty members described the barriers to cross-disciplinary collaboration they encountered and how they eventually worked together across different projects in different interdisciplinary domains to remove these barriers. For example, both institutions recently made changes to graduate student advisor eligibility criteria; previously, only faculty in the same department could be primary advisor. Other policies that had been changed include: giving faculty credit for co-advising in other departments, allowing co-authored dissertation chapters, and broadening fellowship criteria to include students in interdisciplinary programs or topic areas. These multimillion-dollar grants raised the profile of interdisciplinary work on campus (the program began in 1998, and many described this as the first major interdisciplinary research grant at the institution) and helped legitimize it. PIs found themselves as leaders and advocates on campus; several reported being 1 Technically, these are constructs, inputs and emergent states Maura Borrego 4

5 asked to serve on university-level groups to advise the president or provost, while others moved into administrative positions after running an IGERT interdisciplinary training program. Finally, PIs reported how promotion, tenure and faculty hiring had changed since the first IGERT grants were awarded. Tenure committees became more accepting of interdisciplinary collaboration. IGERT success directly or indirectly resulted in more hiring lines for interdisciplinary faculty members. PIs helped develop hiring and support structures to ensure the success of new interdisciplinary faculty members. References Boden, D., Borrego, M., & Newswander, L.K. (2011). Student socialization in interdisciplinary doctoral education. Higher Education, 62(6), Borrego, M., Boden, D., Pietrocola, D., Stoel, C.F., Boone, R., & Ramasubramanian, M.K. (in press 2013). Lasting change at institutions with U.S. National Science Foundation Integrative Graduate Education and Research Traineeship (IGERT) funding for interdisciplinary graduate programs. In S. Crowley, S. Eigenbrode, M. O Rourke & J. D. Wulfhorst (Eds.), Enhancing Communication and Collaboration in Interdisciplinary Research. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Borrego, M., & Cutler, S. (2010). Constructive alignment of interdisciplinary graduate curriculum in engineering and science: An analysis of successful IGERT proposals. Journal of Engineering Education, 99(4), Borrego, M., Karlin, J., McNair, L.D., & Beddoes, K. (in press 2013). Team effectiveness theory from industrial and organizational psychology applied to engineering student project teams A review. Journal of Engineering Education, 102(3). Borrego, M., & Newswander, L.K. (2010). Definitions of interdisciplinary research: Toward graduate-level interdisciplinary learning outcomes. The Review of Higher Education, 34(1), Carney, J., Chawla, D., Wiley, A., & Young, D. (2006). Evaluation of the initial impacts of the national science foundation's integrative graduate education and research traineeship program. Bethesda, MD: Abt Associates, Inc. Crede, E., & Borrego, M. (2012). Learning in graduate engineering research groups of various sizes. Journal of Engineering Education, 101(3), Dunbar, K. (1999). The scientist in vivo : How scientists think and reason in the laboratory. In L. Magnani, N. Nersessian & P. Thagard (Eds.), Model-Based Reasoning in Scientific Discovery (pp ): Plenum Press. Reich, S.M., & Reich, J.A. (2006). Cultural competence in interdisciplinary collaborations: A method for respecting diversity in research partnerships. American Journal of Community Psychology, 38(1-2), Maura Borrego 5