United States

15th Conference on Understanding Interventions 2023 

HBCU Digital Learning Infrastructure Initiative

### Welcome to the 2023 Understanding Interventions/NSF CREST Annual Conference
Welcome to our annual conference, a gathering where the knowledge of our scientific communities share what they have researched since we last met. If it is your first time attending, then thank you for stepping into our world! If you are a returning guest, then thank you for coming back! Whether you are attending for the first or the fourteenth, we treasure your trust in what we have to offer. We promise to make it worth your while.

As in years past, we have put together an energetic collection of seminars, deeper dives, speeches, posters, and workshops to whet your appetite for learning. 

We are delighted that you have chosen to attend the 2023 Annual Understanding Interventions (UI) Conference, in partnership with the NSF Centers for Research Excellence in Science and Technology (CREST) Program. 

### About the Conference 
This conference was established to facilitate dissemination and exchange of hypothesis-based research on interventions and initiatives that broaden participation in science and engineering research careers. The conference is designed to create a dialogue among behavioral/social science and education researchers, evaluators, and faculty in STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) fields who participate in intervention programs. Workshops, sessions, and posters will communicate effective strategies from successful STEM intervention programs, present results from empirical research studies, and synthesize the translation of research findings into practice on STEM learning, undergraduate research, graduate education, and student retention.

Thank you again, and welcome! 
**[Download Program Agenda](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1rTKTrWC2DOqnIF06po5xo4buAL3mPTqZ/view?usp=sharing)**

This conference was established to facilitate dissemination and exchange of hypothesis-based research on interventions and initiatives that broaden participation in science and engineering research careers. The conference is designed to create a dialogue among behavioral/social science and education researchers, evaluators, and faculty in STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) fields who participate in intervention programs.

symposium

The UI INDEX is a resource center for the Interventions community. Central to the UI INDEX is a curated searchable database of the translational interventions literature as well as searchable resources for journals that publish Interventions work, highly cited work and program information regarding work funded by the National Institutes of Health. Participants will learn about the content and usage of these tools. 


UI Index: A Tool Providing a Searchable Interface for Literature on Broadening Participation in Science

First2 Network, a National Science Foundation INCLUDES Alliance originating in WV, aims to improve the retention and success of undergraduate STEM students, with emphasis on rural first-generation students through their first two years of college. At the core of our shared vision to improve student STEM success is the assumption that the students themselves will be co-creators of the solutions.
 
First2 Network includes higher education teams of students, faculty, staff and administrators, as well as government, industry, K12, non-profit and community partners across the state of West Virginia and beyond. Members engage in improvement science, a disciplined way to collaboratively test and scale ideas for changing systems. Selected high impact practices include short-duration summer immersive programs for rising freshmen (Jandy et al., 2021), campus clubs with change ideas led by students, and student ambassador programs to high schools and legislature. Student members who persist in their STEM majors have stronger ties to the network. (Darrah et al., 2022)
 
This colloquium will focus on sharing strategies for keeping student voice and leadership central in a large broadening participation network. We will present the First2 model and learnings from the past 5 years, and invite discourse around the experiences of other colloquium attendees.

Centering a change network in lived realities: A discussion led by First2 Network

To contribute to the diversity of the next generation of NIH funded biomedical researchers, ensuring that undergraduate student participants enter and succeed in graduate school is one of the goals of the BUILDing SCHOLARS center at the University of Texas at El Paso. To accomplish this goal, the center implemented the Johnson and Bozeman Asset Bundles model. Using the Student Hallmarks of Success developed by the NIH Diversity Program Consortium as guidance, and mapping each program activity to the model, academic metrics in combination with results from a comprehensive evaluation plan for the first three cohorts of participants will be presented.<

Developing the Biomedical Researchers of the Future at a Hispanic Serving Institution

UIIMPACTS (Inclusive Matching for Professional Advancement and Career Training in Science) addresses the issue of social/professional integration in STEM across all training levels from high school to professional in providing a public square for dissemination, networking, professional matching and discourse across all STEM. Users of UIIMPACTS (uiimpacts.com), can post, form, moderate and participle in affinity groups, set up e-portfolios, as well as network across disciplines and career stage. User profiles can be formed for individuals, programs and institutions that include demographic information as well as stage in training, research and professional interests. A personal statement of up to 500 words can be posted as part of a user’s profile and an accompanying e-Portfolio can be populated with any work products that include videos, published or unpublished abstracts and manuscripts, as well as presentations. Any user can form groups for mentoring, research interest, professional and social and other affinity interests. Like in any other social media platform, users can post items including media within their group as well as for the general community. The platform also facilitates direct messaging between users/programs and institutions. 

Consider a student attending ERN or ABRCMS sharing their UIIMPACTS identification to prospective programs and institutions where others can see a full representation of that student that include their research experience, work products, level of academic accomplishments, career interests and a full personal statement. One can also consider the broader impacts of this platform in providing a mechanism for social integration and STEM related discourse for students and professionals. This platform also addresses the longstanding frustrations of institutions expressing difficulty in finding individuals from fragmented populations in STEM for training and professional recruitment. 

The UIIMPACTS platform also serves as a potential point of dissemination and recruitment for programs and institutions. Institutions and programs, like individual users, can set up profiles that are searchable where they can have program information (videos, documents etc) in program e-Portfolios. Programs with premium accounts can have searchable access to the database of users to reach potential trainees and employees. Currently, there is a tool available to users that allow searches of all accredited academic and training programs listed with the Department of Education. The search engine can focus geography through selection of city and state. This can be very useful for stunts and professional looking of institutions that have programs that cover Theo professional and training interests. There are other tools in development, including career exploration through aligning lifestyle, work values and work activities with STEM occupations. This tool will provide among many types of information: median salaries and employment projections, certifications, skills, knowledge areas, surveys of those currently employed, and other supporting information as well as videos and training related information individual to each occupation. 



UI IMPACTS: A Public Square Social Media Platform for STEM Mentoring, Networking, and Professional Advancement

This session will provide information regarding publishing in the Understanding Interventions Journal. Attendees will learn of the translational approach to mutually inform practice and scholarship; requirements for the types of publications (letters, communications and full papers) published in the journal; its review processes as well as the supports provided to potential authors including workshops and direct mentoring to facilitate manuscript development. 


UI Journal: Disseminating Interventions Research

Opportunities for Investments in Digital Learning Infrastructure

"Introduction. Undergraduate research experiences (UREs) are increasingly valued as high impact experiential educational activities that have broad and long-standing positive impacts on college students (Kuh, 2008). UREs are beneficial for undergraduate students since they increase students’ research self-efficacy, science identity and impact graduate school enrollment (Carpi et al., 2016). In this study, we look at how faculty perceived benefits and barriers may mediate the effect of funding on undergraduate and graduate research mentees.

Methods. Faculty included in this study are biomedical researchers at a large Hispanic-serving institution that answered a survey in fall of 2015 and 2017. The surveys included information about faculty characteristics and number of student mentees and duration of mentoring relationships as well as information about the students. A set of questions also gathered faculty responses on a set of items stating research-based barriers and benefits to research mentoring. We identified three benefits and two barriers to engaging undergraduates in research among research active biomedical faculty (Monarrez et al, 2020). The factors influencing the number of undergraduate and graduate students mentored in research are assessed using causal models incorporating counterfactuals. For all results, the number of undergraduate or graduate students mentored has ordinal categories 0, 1-4, 5-9, 10+. This allows for use of a quasi-Poisson link for the causal model.

Results. Undergraduate students. There is evidence that having any level of funding versus no funding increases the odds of more undergraduate mentees (OR(less than 50K)=1.11, p-value< 0.001; OR(50K - 150K)=1.06, p-value< 0.001; OR(more than 150K)=1.07, p-value< 0.001). With regard to faculty characteristics, white faculty are more likely than Hispanic faculty to mentor undergraduate students (OR(white)=1.19, p-value< 0.001) and males are also more likely to mentor more students than females (OR(male)=1.06, p-value< 0.001). Being an associate or full professor decreases the odds of mentoring undergraduate students as well (OR(Assoc)=0.88, p-value< 0.001; OR(Full)=0.87, p-value< 0.001). Finally, being in the college of liberal arts (OR(LA)=1.13, p-value< 0.001) or college of science (OR(SCI)=1.28, p-value< 0.001) vs engineering increases the odds of mentoring more undergraduate students.

Graduate students. There is a different pattern on mentoring graduate students than undergraduate students. In general, higher levels of funding results in greater odds of additional graduate student mentees in the natural direct effect (OR(50K – 150K)=1.09, p-value< 0.001; OR(more than 150K)=1.16 p-value< 0.001). White faculty tend to mentor more graduate students (OR(white)=1.13, p-value< 0.001) and females do as well (OR(males)=0.95, p-value< 0.001). Finally, being a full professor increases odds of more graduate mentees (OR(full)=1.06, p-value< 0.001) and College of Engineering faculty have higher odds of more graduate mentees than any other college.

Conclusion and Discussions. Overall, we see that funding levels affect the number of students (undergraduate and graduate) mentored and that the self-reported perceptions about undergraduate mentoring do not strongly affect the number of mentees at either the undergraduate or graduate level. Thus, we found no to little effect of faculty perception on actual number of research mentees. However, for both models, we do identify faculty characteristics, related to the benefits and barriers that affect the number of research mentees. The evidence provided in this study takes one step further to suggest that even small amounts of funding can have consistent and uniform effect on enabling biomedical research faculty to engage in and support undergraduate research mentees in projects. This is a practical issue and could be due to the higher salaries and time investment required for mentoring graduate students. Otherwise, both models (for undergraduate and graduate students) indicate that faculty-level characteristics do affect number of mentored students. Our results sheds light on the importance of funding support in interventions related to undergraduate research experiences.

Acknowledgments. Research reported in this paper was supported by the National Institute of General Medical Sciences of the National Institutes of Health under linked Award Numbers RL5GM118969, TL4GM118971, and UL1GM118970."

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