(372g) The Research Proposition and Professional Development: First Year Graduate Student Preparation

            Twenty years ago, our department initiated an independent research proposition course for all first year PhD candidates. Student performance in this spring semester three unit course was treated as a graduate qualifier exam, and both students and faculty have been supportive of this requirement, as summarized earlier¹.

            Over the last decade, our first year approach to research education has broadened. Peter Kilpatrick added a one unit fall course, Introduction to Research, a professional development course including research ethics, presentations, and publications. While these two courses were satisfying as stand-alone efforts, recent faculty and graduate student sentiment pushed for an earlier engagement of student with research advisor, PhD committee, and research itself.

            In response, we have developed a yet broader first year experience encompassing a pair of two unit courses, one each in fall and spring. In the first, professional development topics are followed by creation of an independent, ten page research proposal. The second, spring semester effort requires the student, in consultation with her new advisor, to develop a NSF length proposal for the prospective PhD effort, and present it to her nascent PhD committee and course instructor. Additionally, earlier engagement with the PhD committee is now achieved through a January, second year oral report. The customary university Preliminary Exam occurs at the beginning of year three, and includes both a document (progress and plans) and an oral presentation.

            In summary, we now have the following early research requirements:

            Semester                      Activity                      Deliverables___________________        

            Fall (1st)                       Intro to research          10 p proposal: independent

            Spring(2nd)                   PhD research proposal 15 p. collab. proposal: PhD plan

            Spring (4th)                  Progress report            Oral presentation to PhD committee

            Fall (5th)                      Preliminary exam        PhD progress & plans (document)

                                                                            and presentation to PhD committee

            _________________________________________________________________

            Taken together, these activities constitute a broad and continuing “Introduction to Research” including considerable practice opportunities in writing proposals (3) and delivering oral presentations (4). These formal structures guarantee that all topics central to setting the stage for a successful research PhD experience are encountered early in what is typically a five year effort.

            Our formal approach is consistent with recent studies of “How People Learn” (2), in which  Donovan, Bransford and Pellegrino argue that “To develop competence in an area of inquiry, students must (a) have a deep foundation of factual knowledge, (b) understand facts and ideas in the context of a conceptual framework, and (c) organize knowledge in ways that facilitate retrieval and application”

             We believe that our early introduction of literature searching and  reading reviews and original articles centered around a simple hypothesis provides opportunity to initiate foundation knowledge construction, that the conceptual framework of writing in proposal format provides a focus for the student to demonstrate “understanding of facts and ideas in the (research) context”, and that the written proposals and oral presentations repeatedly force the student to “organize knowledge in ways that facilitate retrieval and application.”

 Evaluation by graduate students

            Formal course evaluations for the first three semesters of the independent, fallproposal and the first two of the collaborative spring proposal appear in Table 2 .These two writing courses fair well compared to our other department graduate courses (including reactors, transport, thermodynamics, and applied mathematics) and to the 1-5 absolute standard of our evaluation scale. Given the apparent initial hostility of new graduate students toward technical writing, these end-of-semester evaluations represent a significant achievement.

 Table 2

 Course: (5.0 max)                                Intro to Research                     PhD proposition

                                                         Fall semester                           Spring semester

The instructor…                                  F 08     F 09     F 10                 S 09    S 10

1. …stated course objectives                4.4/4.6 4.5/4.5 4.6/4.6             4.6/4.3 4.8/4.5

2. was receptive outside class               4.6/4.9         4.2/4.3       4.5/4.3             4.4/4.3             4.6/4.4

3. explained difficult materials             4.3/4.3           3.9/4.0       4.6/4.2             4.4/3.9 4.6/4.3

4. was enthusiastic re/teaching            4.6/4.5 4.2/4.4 4.6/4.5             4.6/4.3            4.4/4.4

5 was prepared for class                    4.2/4.6            3.8/4.4      4.5/4.6               4.6/4.3             4.0/4.4

6. gave prompt, useful feedback         4.4/4.3             4.2/4.0     4.5/4.3               4.3/4.0 4.2/4.2

7. used instructional technology          4.1/4.5             3.3/4.2     4.0/4.3               4.3/4.3             4.2/4.4

8 treated students with respect          4.6/4.6             4.4/4.5 4.8/4.6             4.5/4.5             4.7/4.5

9. was an effective teacher               4.5/4.5             4.1/4.2     4.7/4.3            4.4/4.1             4.3/4.4

The course …

10. …readings were valuable aids       4.4/4.5           3.6/4.2      4.3/4.2                4.6/4.2             4.3/4.3

11. assignments aided learning         4.6/4.6             4.1/4.3     4.5/4.4             4.8/4.3             4.1/4.2

12. was intellectually challenging       4.4/4.7             3.9/4.4     4.3/4.6             4.8/4.4             4.6/4.5

13. improved subject knowledge       4.4/4.6             4.1/4.5   4.4/4.6               4.9/4.4             4.6/4.5

14. was excellent                          4.3/4.4             3.9/4.2     4.3/4.3             4.4/4.2             4.3/4.3

_________________________________________________________________________

* Student completion of online  university survey is optional, (unfortunately) not mandatory.

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Instructor time commitment

            Scheduled instructor-student discussions are important to the student, and also constitute a substantial and necessary part of the instructor’s time commitment to the course. For example, the fall two unit course includes two 20 minute sessions with each student, so for our two most recent years, class size was 20-24 students, hence requiring 7-8 hours of discussions twice a semester. The final presentation at 15 min(fall) and 30 min (spring practice) and 1 hr.(spring final) /student add 5-6 and 30-36 hours of instructor contact per semester, respectively. These times commitments are partially offset by moving from two classes/wk to one/week as the semesters progress.

Evaluations: Faculty

             After the first two academic years (08/09 and 09/10)  of the present format,  our faculty who had accepted new students in these years were surveyed to ascertain their assessment of the new spring student-advisor collaborative format for producing a PhD research proposal. Our questionnaire asked about changes in the speed and depth of advisor engagement, integration into advisor lab group, and encounters with the PhD committee.

            The results in Table 3 (next page) show that faculty are overwhelmingly positive about the new format. The faculty have, necessarily, a longer experience with current and former proposal formats for the first year experience than do the grads. The table shows that the new format results in faster engagement with a PhD research topic, advisor conversations, integration into lab groups, and conversations with the PhD committees. We conclude that the new format fruitfully addresses the prior concerns of both our faculty and graduate students.

Table 3

Faculty Survey: Spring research proposition course

 AS-agree strongly, A-agree, N-neutral, D-disagree, DS-disagree strongly

                                                                               AS       A         N         D         DS

SPRING PROPOSITION

The spring proposition …

1. …increased speed of student engagement

with (Ph D) research topic                                          8         7          1          0          0

2. …increased speed/depth of engagement

with research advisor                                                  5          9          2          0          0

3. … increased speed of integration into

lab group                                                                 5          6          4          0          1

4. …led to earlier formation of PhD

committee                                                                 6         6          3          0          1

5. …led to earlier engagement with

(some of) PhD committee                                           5         9          1          1          0

6. … allowed earlier advising/counseling

of student by advisor                                                  4          9          2          1          0

_______________________________________________________________________

            Whether such spring effort is productive can also be judged by student evaluations. In Table 2, responses to statements 10-14 illustrate graduate student satisfaction with what was learned from the spring proposals as the responses were among the highest in the table. No student has complained that the second, spring collaborative proposition was a duplicative or repetitive version of the fall independent proposal !

Conclusions

            Research is the dominant activity of graduate programs.  Consequently, formal  training in aspects of research should be a logical part of first year graduate study.  The present article illustrates how to smoothly engage new graduate students with their research topics and committees through construction,  presentation, and defense of several written propositions.  The courses described here have been taught in one form or another for twenty years, and have been strongly accepted and endorsed by both new PhD graduate students and their faculty advisors as the surveys reported here indicate.

            These two courses could easily be taught elsewhere.  Graduate student opportunity to write creative papers about research has been repeatedly shown to be productive via our twenty year history of these offerings, now to more than 300 graduate PhD candidates.  The total teaching load for such a course is similar to that for any three unity traditional offering.  What is most different and required is the presence of an instructor dedicated to enhancing each student’s storytelling skill in the research domain. 

References

1. Ollis, D. F., The Research Proposition, Chemical Engineering Education, Fall 1995, p. 222.

2. Donovan, M. S., Bransford, J. D, and Pellegrino, J. W., (eds) How People Learn: Bridging Research and Practice, National Academy Press, Washington, DC 1999, p. 12.