Abstract (227 words):
Interdisciplinary teams are on the rise as scientists attempt to address complex environmental issues. While the benefits of Team Science approaches are clear, researchers often struggle with its implementation, particularly for new team members. The challenges of large projects often weigh on the most vulnerable members of a team: trainees, including undergraduate students, graduate students, and post-doctoral researchers. Trainees on big projects have to navigate their role on the team, with learning project policies, procedures, and goals, all while also training in key scientific tasks such as co-authoring papers. To address these challenges, we created and participated in a project-specific, graduate-level Team Science course. The purposes of this course were to: (1) introduce students to the goals of the project, (2) build trainees’ understanding of how big projects operate, and (3) allow trainees to explore how their research interests dovetailed with the overall project. Additionally, trainees received training regarding: (1) diversity, equity & inclusion, (2) giving and receiving feedback, and (3) effective communication. Onboarding through the Team Science course cultivated psychological safety and a collaborative student community across disciplines and institutions. Thus, we recommend a Team Science course for onboarding students to big projects to help students establish the skills necessary for collaborative research. Project-based Team Science classes can benefit student advancement, enhance the productivity of the project, and accelerate the discovery of solutions to ecological issues.
The Science of Team Science and Training the Next Generation of Scientists
Increasingly complex scientific challenges require spanning borders, institutions, and disciplines and thus are inherently infeasible for a single lab group to tackle in isolation. Scientific teams are needed to tackle our most complicated and persistent environmental issues; thus, it is a key skill to build in the future ecological and environmental sciences workforce (Cheruvelil and Soranno 2018). Team Science is the term used to denote collaborative scientific research “conducted by more than one person in an interdependent fashion, including research conducted by small teams and larger groups” (National Research Council 2015). Team Science approaches are on the rise in academic research (Jones et al. 2008, Farrell et al. 2021). Training on big (>10 people; National Research Council 2015), interdisciplinary projects is a great asset to graduate students and early-career researchers, as large professional networks and collaboration skills are key to building modern science careers (Hampton and Parker 2011, Bennett and Gadlin 2012, Read et al. 2016, Pannell et al. 2019).
As scientific teams grow (Wuchty et al. 2007), they become increasingly diverse in terms of disciplinary expertise (O’Rourke et al. 2019), demographics (Gibbs et al. 2019), and geographic and institutional representation (Jones et al. 2008) (among other axes of diversity). Increasing diversity on teams is related to innovation and novelty (Hofstra et al. 2020, Yang et al. 2022) and greater impact through increased citations (Freeman and Huang 2014, AlShebli et al. 2018). However, increasing team science and diversity also leads to an increase in the number of barriers that must be overcome to effectively collaborate (Bennett et al. 2018). Team climate, defined as “the perceived set of norms, attributes, and expectations on a team” affects the team’s outcomes (Settles et al. 2019). Thus, understanding how collaborative teams operate and how they can become better is the focus of the emerging field, the Science of Team Science (SciTS), established in 2006 (Hall et al. 2018).
A key report by the National Research Council on the Enhancing the Effectiveness of Team Science (National Research Council 2015) highlights seven key challenges to conducting Team Science, including: 1) addressing team diversity, (2) integrating across knowledge domains, (3) larger team sizes that create coordination issues, (4) misaligned goals within the team, (5) permeable boundaries and changing team membership, (6) geographic dispersal and coordination, and (7) interdependence on tasks among subgroups. The report also articulates key areas of focus for improving team effectiveness, including: (1) a shared understanding of team processes, (2) university processes to support team science, (3) collaboration technology and virtual collaboration, and (4) the role of funders in requiring teams to articulate collaboration plans. The NRC Report’s Chapter 3 concludes that training interventions (e.g., professional development, promoting a shared understanding of roles and goals) are a promising way to increase team effectiveness (National Research Council 2015). Despite this conclusion and the rise of large collaborative teams conducting science on important issues, professional development training in Team Science has not kept pace with how science is conducted.
Herein, we present one model of how a project-specific Team Science class oriented to the trainees on a big, collaborative project can address many of the challenges highlighted within the NRC report, while enhancing student engagement and inclusion. Specifically, this class addressed Challenge 1 by specifically covering diversity and power dynamics and created a collaborative Code of Conduct (Supplemental Info 1, Supplemental Info 2). Furthermore, we addressed Challenge 2 by integrating knowledge across domains through the development and workshopping of conceptual models (Panel 1). We spent considerable class time addressing Challenge 3 (coordination), Challenge 4 (goals), and Challenge 6 (geographic dispersion) through a focus of half of the class time on project-specific documents and policies (Supplemental Info 1). We will describe the details of the class, team building activities, and project policies herein with the goal of providing a template for other large collaborative projects to use in building their own cohort-based Team Science classes.
Problems with Integrating Trainees into Big Projects
Graduate student onboarding and training strategies tailored to Team Science projects are generally insufficient or non-existent. Yet, big projects present distinct challenges to students who have not yet developed the skills needed for successful scientific collaboration. Regardless of project size or training program, entering graduate school means conducting research while adapting to a new advisor’s management style and navigating the unwritten rules of graduate school, i.e., the hidden curriculum (Pensky et al. 2021). Trainees involved in big, interdisciplinary projects must then balance these new skills with challenges, such as working with an extended network of additional advisors with unique personalities, interdependent data streams, unfamiliar methodology, and sometimes conflicting research objectives (Cheruvelil et al. 2014). The approach to ecological research has also shifted in recent years, with more projects adopting a wider lens to gain a more comprehensive view of their ecosystem of interest. Unless intentional effort is made to harmonize the differences among research groups and align research goals, the consequences of poor collaboration frequently fall on graduate students, who are least equipped to deal with them (Zucker 2012, Read et al. 2016, Pannell et al. 2019, Deng et al. 2022).
A project-wide, cohort-based Team Science course is an ideal vehicle for onboarding trainees to big projects. Our model Team Science course cultivated community among trainees and gave trainees (the authors of this paper) the skills necessary to collaborate effectively across big projects. Team Science classes can orient an emerging team to the design, implementation, and procedures of a specific project. This framework brings students together with the goal of building community on the project, improving communication, providing iterative feedback, and placing individual research into the context of the larger project.
Our model course brought together one cohort of trainees from six institutions who were joining a big, interdisciplinary scientific team: the Aquatic Intermittency effects of Microbiomes in Streams [AIMS] project. AIMS is a $6.6M National Science Foundation [NSF]-funded collaboration of 19 faculty investigators (~50% early career researchers [ECRs]), 6 postdoctoral associates, 19 graduate students, and 9 undergraduate students spread across three general regions of the US (Figure 1). AIMS applies collaborative, interdisciplinary approaches to study how stream flow intermittency (i.e., periods of drying and wetting) affects downstream water quality. The project includes researchers from various scientific backgrounds, including biogeochemistry, macroinvertebrate ecology, hydrology, and microbiology (Figure 1).
Designing AIMS’ Team Science Class
To onboard students to AIMS, a project-wide, synchronous, 2-credit course in Team Science was offered in Fall 2021. Fifteen graduate trainees from six institutions comprised the cohort of trainees on the project and participated in the Team Science course led by AIMS Principal Investigator (PI), Dr. Amy Burgin. The group met virtually twice a week for 15 weeks with the overarching goal to acquaint new trainees with each other and to the AIMS project’s policies and procedures (Supplemental Information 1). Virtual class meetings were hosted over Zoom, which allowed us to record classes for future trainees. Course files and discussion boards were hosted with Perusall in the absence of a common Learning Management System (e.g., Blackboard or Canvas). Slack was used for class communication, which fostered open, transparent communication wherein the trainees’ advisors could observe and engage in class activities. Trainees, along with the PI, participated in creating a class code of conduct regarding course participation and how to treat one another (Supplemental Information 2). Overall, the Team Science course assisted trainees with understanding the expectations of their direct advisors and their role within the larger project, while also building a community amongst the graduate students and promoting feelings of inclusion and support on the team (Figure 2).
The design of the Team Science course balanced foundational collaboration principles with details of AIMS-specific policies and procedures (see syllabus in Supplemental Info 1). The instructor designed the class such that approximately half of the content centered on key skills needed to develop a well-functioning team. These included Diversity, Equity & Inclusion (DEI) training, constructive and iterative feedback, and effective communication, and were driven by trainee-led discussions (Bennett and Gadlin 2012, Cheruvelil et al. 2014, Cheruvelil and Soranno 2018; Supplemental Info 1). The other half of class time focused on AIMS-specific documents, including the Code of Conduct (Supplemental Info 2), project proposal, mentoring agreements (Supplemental Info 3), authorship policies (Supplemental Info 4 and 5), and project evaluation plan. The project policies, which were the foundation for much of the course, were established through the creation of a project-wide implementation plan and were therefore already agreed upon by all senior members of the project.
The major product for student assessment was the development of conceptual models by each trainee specific to their individual research questions in relation to the overall project goals and datasets. Building and workshopping conceptual models of their study systems, and thinking through the connections to the larger project, encouraged each trainee to envision their role within the overall team and assisted in building connections amongst sub-projects within the overall AIMS network. Iterative feedback on the conceptual models was provided by small groups throughout the course (assignment details and an example provided in Panel 1). These small groups were intentionally designed to be cross-disciplinary and cross-regional, allowing trainees to develop relationships with others they may not have interacted with otherwise, in addition to helping build a working project vocabulary that reached across disciplines. Additionally, trainees had the opportunity to meet one-on-one with the PI to receive individualized feedback. This culminated in the course final in which trainees presented their conceptual models at the (virtual) AIMS project All Hands Meeting, whereby they formally introduced themselves and their ideas to the larger project team. Through sharing these conceptual models with each other and the AIMS team, trainees learned where their research fit in the larger context of the AIMS project. The exercise also facilitated the introduction of trainees to the network of collaborators. While sharing these conceptual models, students were able to gauge where there was overlap and potential collaboration between different fields of study. This led to trainees working together to identify how certain ecosystem processes could be working in tandem and how best to quantify those interactions.