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.