Social Science Research Council

Efforts are underway to reform graduate education and training programs in ways that prepare students for new models of scientific research and new modes of scientific employment. These reform efforts have led to the development of what we call "innovative, interdisciplinary, and integrative" – or I3 – approaches to graduate education and training, and to new programs like the Integrative Graduate Education and Research Training initiative (IGERT).

Like many I3 approaches, IGERTs seek to: (a) ground students in the fundamentals of their own fields as well as expose them to several subfields of science and engineering, (b) develop students’ technical proficiencies as well as their abilities to communicate complex ideas and to work well in teams, and (c) prepare students to engage the diverse publics concerned with science and technology in ways that shape policy and inform practice in various sectors and contexts.

Despite the enthusiastic calls and sizeable investments to promote I3 graduate education and training, there has been very little generalizable empirical investigation of the conditions, processes, and outcomes of this new approach. While individual programs are assessing their work as they go, there has been no formulation of the causal relationships by which these programs can be understood, let alone assessed. Thus, at the same time that I3 programs like the IGERT initiative could provide the proper training grounds for new modes of scientific research, we currently lack the tools or theories to really know.

The goal of the Formation of Interdisciplinary Scientists project is to develop and deploy such tools and theories. While this study focuses on the IGERT initiative as its program of study, the project will yield results that will benefit the formation of interdisciplinary scientists more broadly.

First, the project is aimed squarely at improving the quality of I3 approaches to graduate education and training generally, with the intrinsic objective of improving the education of doctoral scientists and engineers and the practical benefit of guiding the substantial investments of federal funds and university faculty.

Second, research and evaluation of higher education on the scale proposed here is a new venture that will develop capabilities in the field and will guide university administrators. Research on higher education and training in the art and science of administration and institutional leadership are critical to the future of the university, and the proposed study will contribute to this endeavor.

Third, decision makers in government, academe, and foundations are deeply concerned about interdisciplinarity, so the fundamental knowledge produced by the project will find an attentive audience prepared to learn from it and act accordingly. Interdisciplinarity has become a core strategie objective of influential organizations like the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health.

Fourth, the study aims not only to offer an assessment and programmatic guidance but also to make a major substantive contribution to the growing literatures on interdisciplinarity, higher education, and science studies. Perhaps most important in this regard, the study productively blends ideas from the literatures on higher education and science studies, and will lead to scholarship that will attract attention in both fields.

Finally, the use-inspired basic research proposed here opens new territory.a compromise between traditional evaluation and theory-driven social research which may serve as an exemplar for others.

This study is funded by the National Science Foundation Division of Research, Evaluation and Communication with additional funds coming from the Division of Graduate Education and the Directorate for Social, Behavioral, and Economic Sciences.