Supporting the Dissertation Process with Grad Tools

Heavy use of an online collaboration and learning environment (CLE) at a large research university led the graduate school to consider how a CLE might support dissertation committees. The project team conducted focus groups with 38 student, faculty, and administrative staff to determine system requirements. Results showed that users would benefit from a tool designed to facilitate the dissertation process, especially if social norms and work-benefit disparity issues were directly addressed. The development team designed and built a "dissertation navigator" in our CLE. 645 users have adopted Grad Tools, suggesting that some traditional groupware design challenges have been overcome.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/108481/1/p144-lotia.pdfDescription of p144-lotia.pdf : Main articl

Internship Experiences Contribute to Confident Career Decision Making for Doctoral Students in the Life Sciences.

The Graduate Student Internships for Career Exploration (GSICE) program at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), offers structured training and hands-on experience through internships for a broad range of PhD-level careers. The GSICE program model was successfully replicated at the University of California, Davis (UC Davis). Here, we present outcome data for a total of 217 PhD students participating in the UCSF and UC Davis programs from 2010 to 2015 and 2014 to 2015, respectively. The internship programs at the two sites demonstrated comparable participation, internship completion rates, and overall outcomes. Using survey, focus group, and individual interview data, we find that the programs provide students with career development skills, while increasing students' confidence in career exploration and decision making. Internships, in particular, were perceived by students to increase their ability to discern a career area of choice and to increase confidence in pursuing that career. We present data showing that program participation does not change median time to degree and may help some trainees avoid "default postdocs." Our findings suggest important strategies for institutions developing internship programs for PhD students, namely: including a structured training component, allowing postgraduation internships, and providing a central organization point for internship programs

Student Learning Plans: Supporting Every Student's Transition to College and Career

Student learning plans (SLPs) represent an emerging practice in how public schools across the country are supporting the development of students' college and career readiness skills. Learning plans are student-driven planning and monitoring tools that provide opportunities to identify postsecondary goals, explore college and career options and develop the skills necessary to be autonomous, self-regulated learners. Currently, 23 states plus the District of Columbia require that students develop learning plans, and Massachusetts state policymakers are considering whether all middle and high school students should be required to develop learning plans. Legislation is currently pending that calls for the Executive Office of Education to convene an advisory group to investigate and study a development and implementation process for six-year career planning to be coordinated by licensed school guidance counselors for all students in grades 6 to 12.The purpose of the policy brief Student Learning Plans: Supporting Every Student's Transition to College and Career is to provide policymakers in Massachusetts with a better understanding of what student learning plans are as well as how and to what extent their use is mandated in other states. The brief is organized into five major sections: an overview of SLPs and the rationale for their use in public K-12 education; an overview of the research on the effectiveness of SLPs on improving a variety of student outcomes, including engagement, responsibility, motivation, long-term postsecondary college and career planning; current state trends in mandating SLPs for all students, including the structure and implementation of SLPs, their connection to other high school reform initiatives and their alignment with state and federal career awareness and workforce development initiatives; promising implementation strategies; and, considerations for state policymakers.Considerations for Massachusetts policymakers include: learn from states that are pioneers in the implementation of SLPs for all students; develop a comprehensive implementation plan; and, strengthen career counseling and career awareness activities in Massachusetts schools.The policy brief was the subject of discussion during a public webinar on June 30, 2011

Publish, not Perish: Supporting Graduate Students as Aspiring Authors

BACKGROUND Students pursuing advanced degrees are increasingly expected to contribute to their discipline’s scholarly discourse during their tenure in graduate school. However, they are often unsure of how or where to begin the publishing process, and do not always feel comfortable asking for help from their faculty advisors or fellow students. Scholars, including librarians, have attempted to address these concerns by developing tools and services to meet the needs of future faculty. In recent years, university presses and research libraries have recognized their shared mission in furthering scholarship, with libraries themselves offering publishing education and expertise. PROJECT OVERVIEW During the 2012-2013 academic year, subject librarians and publishing professionals at the University of Michigan Library crafted a program to address students’ questions and concerns about the publishing lifecycle. This ongoing initiative includes a multi-semester workshop series developed in concert with faculty from departments throughout campus, as well as a supplementary online toolkit that takes into account the rapidly evolving nature of scholarly communication. LESSONS LEARNED Major takeaways from this program include: the value of student assessment in shaping publishing workshops; awareness of the discrepancies of registration numbers and actual attendance, highlighting the potential for enhanced promotion techniques; the importance of university press and faculty insight; and the benefits of collaboration among librarians, publishing professionals, and faculty members. NEXT STEPS Future iterations of this program will incorporate in-depth assessment of each program, a more interactive learning environment, and better scheduling and promotion of the workshop series

Breaking Under/Grad - Assessing and Addressing Stress, Anxiety, and Resiliency Among Undergraduate and Graduate Students via Motivational Interviewing and A Smart, Healthy Campus Intervention

The purpose of this dissertation was to assess mental health among students, as well as innovative interventions designed to provide tools to cope with the mental health challenges of stress and anxiety while building resiliency. Three distinct, yet related, studies were conducted. Study I: This academic-year-long pilot study explored senior students’ (‘mentors’; N= 30) experiences interacting with first-years to build resilience via physical activity (PA) and mentorship. Mentors’ psychosocial experiences were tracked via qualitative interviews and validated questionnaires at pre-, mid-, and immediate post-intervention. Inductive content analysis revealed the program’s positive influence on PA, resilience, and mental health; and some added stressors. One-way, repeated-measures ANOVAs indicated few statistically significant findings regarding participants’ levels of resilience, behavioural control, and positive affect. Study II: This mixed methods pilot study investigated graduate students’ (n = 11) experiences in an 8-month peer coaching program. Participants’ psychosocial experiences were assessed via individual semi-structured interviews and validated questionnaires (BRS, MHI, SF-36) at pre-, mid-, and immediate post-intervention. Inductive content analysis revealed peer coaching as having positively impacted participants’ ability to cope with stress and anxiety, and enhanced resilience. One-way, repeated-measures ANOVAs indicated no statistical significance for any of the questionnaires/surveys. Study III:Through the distribution of three campus-wide surveys/questionnaires (i.e. BRS, n= 598; MHI, n= 619; SF-36, n= 696),information was gathered about the current state of mental health and wellness, and resiliency among undergraduate (UGS) and graduate students(GS). Focus groups were conducted to enhance and put in context the quantitative information. Both UGS and GS indicated more services are needed to address mental health, with a need for more counsellors. PA positively affected mental health and resilience for both groups. The need for easier/increased access to PA was voiced. The findings from these studies have demonstrated that while GS experience some different stressors than UGS, and that they would prefer to access mental health-related services in an environment separate from UGS, both groups: (a) struggle with stress and anxiety; (b) voiced the need for more counsellors; and (c) described PA and peer-coaching/mentorship as benefitting their mental health and resilience

The role of libraries in teaching doctoral students to become information-literate researchers:A review of existing practices and recommendations for the future

Purpose This paper aims to review current literature pertaining to information literacy and digital literacy skills and practices within the research workflow for doctoral students and makes recommendations for how libraries (and others) can foster skill-sets for graduate student research workflows for the twenty-first century scholarly researcher. Design/methodology/approach A review of existing information literacy practices for doctoral students was conducted, and four key areas of knowledge were identified and discussed. Findings The findings validate the need for graduate students to have training in information literacy, information management, knowledge management and scholarly communication. It recommends empirical studies to be conducted to inform future practices for doctoral students. Practical implications This paper offers four areas of training to be considered by librarians and faculty advisers to better prepare scholars for their future. Originality/value This paper presents a distinctive synthesis of the types of information literacy and digital literacy skills needed by graduate students

Building an Open-Source Archive for Born-Digital Dissertations

This proposal for a Level I Digital Humanities Start-Up Grant would support an interdisciplinary workshop aimed at identifying the issues, opportunities and requirements for developing an open-source system into which born-digital dissertations (e.g., interactive webtexts, software, games, etc.) can be deposited and maintained, and through which they can be accessed and cross-referenced. The workshop will build upon the framework set up by the Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations (NDLDT) and the United States Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Association (USETDA), which support the creation and dissemination of digital dissertations, but, despite best efforts, do not currently offer a comprehensive, central repository or index of born-digital dissertations such as exists for print (e.g., Proquest). One of the primary goals for this workshop will be to develop a plan for the development of such a tool as well as the identification of a project advisory board

Grad-CAM++: Improved Visual Explanations for Deep Convolutional Networks

Over the last decade, Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) models have been highly successful in solving complex vision problems. However, these deep models are perceived as "black box" methods considering the lack of understanding of their internal functioning. There has been a significant recent interest in developing explainable deep learning models, and this paper is an effort in this direction. Building on a recently proposed method called Grad-CAM, we propose a generalized method called Grad-CAM++ that can provide better visual explanations of CNN model predictions, in terms of better object localization as well as explaining occurrences of multiple object instances in a single image, when compared to state-of-the-art. We provide a mathematical derivation for the proposed method, which uses a weighted combination of the positive partial derivatives of the last convolutional layer feature maps with respect to a specific class score as weights to generate a visual explanation for the corresponding class label. Our extensive experiments and evaluations, both subjective and objective, on standard datasets showed that Grad-CAM++ provides promising human-interpretable visual explanations for a given CNN architecture across multiple tasks including classification, image caption generation and 3D action recognition; as well as in new settings such as knowledge distillation.Comment: 17 Pages, 15 Figures, 11 Tables. Accepted in the proceedings of IEEE Winter Conf. on Applications of Computer Vision (WACV2018). Extended version is under review at IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligenc