Progress 04/15/22 to 02/14/25

Outputs
Target Audience:Undergraduate students at 4-year institutions, professors, and deans at colleges of agriculture were targeted. Undergraduate students were targeted because they are the project's focal point and provide critical data to understand the current landscape of colleges of agriculture. Faculty were targeted because the data generated will provide insight on improving support for students, recruitment efforts, and retention rates. College and department administrators including deans and department chairs were targeted because they provide access to students across programs simultaneously, and the data will be important for them to support broad, programmatic changes across the college. When creating a survey to understand high school student's interest in and perception of agriculture, the targeted audience included agricultural extension officers and outreach coordinators. Once validated, the survey will allow this audience to evaluate various programs' impact on pre-collegiate students. Changes/Problems:Due to her selection as an AAAS Science and Technology Policy Fellow and placement at the National Science Foundation in September 2024, the Donald Danforth Plant Science Center chose to terminate all affiliations with the Postdoctoral Fellow. This significantly stalled her efforts to disseminate results including the validated survey instrument and survey results. She remains hopeful that she will be able to publish results, but is not sure if and how she can proceed, given instructions provided to her upon her termination. What opportunities for training and professional development has the project provided?This project allowed the Fellow to purchase and consult American Educational Research Association (AERA's) Standards for Educational and Psychological Testing to develop and validate surveys for the project. After drafting an email requesting participation from deans, the Fellow received feedback from her advisor on communicating with higher education administrators to incentivize action. The Fellow used her project and data collected to apply to be a Mixture Modeling for Discipline-based Education Research (MM4DBER) Fellow, an NSF-funded training program. As a postdoctoral fellowship project, Goal 1 above outlines the professional development objectives provided. During the course of her fellowship, the Fellow became interested in career development and focused a significant amount of time reading the existing literature, writing grants to evaluate career development in the agricultural and botanical sectors, and contributing to manuscript. How have the results been disseminated to communities of interest?Major results and summary statistics from College of Agriculture undergraduate students from two R1 land-grant universities (one Midwestern, one Southeastern) were distributed to their dean's offices by email. ?In her pursuit to gain experience and expertise in career development, the Fellow became involved in a project evaluating the alignment between academia and non-academic career sectors in the context of plant science. This resulted in a pair of publications in Plants, People, Planet as well as a poster accepted for the American Society of Plant Biologists Conference What do you plan to do during the next reporting period to accomplish the goals? Nothing Reported

Impacts
What was accomplished under these goals? Goal 1: The project's first goal is to provide an opportunity to the Fellow to receive appropriate postdoctoral training to enter the federal workforce. The Fellow refined her technical skills by gaining experience validating a survey and developing a survey from scratch (Objective 1.1). The Postdoctoral Fellow was selected as a Mixture Modeling for Discipline-based Education Research (MM4DBER) Fellow, an NSF-funded training program that enabled her to learn how to use mixture modeling and consider how the data collected for this project could be analyzed using mixture models. The Fellow gained experience identifying contributors and participants for the project by crafting a template to communicate with deans and other administrative staff. The Fellow emailed representatives from over 80 Colleges of Agriculture and the heads of 35 agriculture departments for institutions that did not have a College of Agriculture (Objective 1.2). Five institutions were contacted by the fellow for participation during the validation process. The Fellow refined her communication skills with college deans (Objective 1.3). Two deans from research-intensive universities were successfully contacted to distribute surveys for validation to their student bodies. After preliminary data was analyzed, a summary sheet of results was sent to both deans by the Fellow. In November 2023, the Postdoctoral Fellow applied the technical, networking, and communication skills she had been developing to apply to be an American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) Science & Technology Fellow. In January 2024, she was selected to be a semi-finalist and presented a 1-page memo responding to an Executive Order as part of the continued selection process. She was selected as a finalist in March 2024 and interviewed with five different agencies in April 2024. She was placed as an AAAS Fellow at the National Science Foundation in September 2024. Goal 2: The project's second goal is to assess the current state of undergraduate education in agriculture. Published undergraduate surveys were extensively reviewed and modified by the Fellow to create an undergraduate survey for college of agriculture students composed of four sections: student motivations, student limitations/barriers, career resources, and demographic questions (Objective 2.1). After development, the survey was validated using an iterative qualitative and quantitative process (Objective 2.2). The validated survey developed in the first year of the project was disseminated nationwide, yielding 1624 undergraduate responses after the dataset was cleaned (Objective 2.3). Preliminary results were shared with academic representatives (Objective 2.4). Goal 3: The project's third goal is to evaluate how different exposure levels to ag science impact pre-collegiate youth in their value of and interest in ag science. To the Fellow's knowledge, no survey instruments have been developed to measure value or interest in ag science. Therefore, an exhaustive literature review was conducted to create a survey instrument that can be deployed to measure pre-collegiate student's 1) Perception of Agriculture; 2) Career Perception and Interest; and 3) Ag science interest (Objective 3.2). Feedback was provided to the Fellow by the Danforth Center's Education Research & Outreach Lab, as well as two Illinois Extension officers. During the project, the postdoctoral fellow learned about the complexity of survey validation, especially with minors. As a result, this goal was tabled to prioritize Goal 2.

Publications

• Type: Peer Reviewed Journal Articles Status: Published Year Published: 2023 Citation: Sidoti, B. J., Parsley, K. M., Walsh, L. L., Callis-Duehl, K., Hove, A., Liu, H., Bruce-Opris, H., Gonzalez, R., Ospina, D., Uzcategui, M., Baraloto, C., & McCartney, M. (2023). Characterizing the landscape of plant science careers in the United States I: Government and private sector perspectives. Plants, People, Planet, (6). https://doi.org/10.1002/ppp3.10375.
• Type: Peer Reviewed Journal Articles Status: Published Year Published: 2023 Citation: Walsh, L. L., Parsley, K. M., Sidoti, B. J., Callis-Duehl, K., Hove, A. A., Liu, H., Bruce-Opris, H., Gonzalez, R., Ospina, D., Uzcategui, M., Baraloto, C., & McCartney, M. (2023). Characterizing the landscape of plant science careers in the United States II: Academic perspectives. Plants, People, Planet. https://doi.org/10.1002/ppp3.10374
• Type: Conference Papers and Presentations Status: Other Year Published: 2024 Citation: Walsh, L.L., K. Parsley, M. McCartney, A. Hove, H. Liu, B. Sidoti, E. Wester, and K. Callis-Duehl. 2024. Identifying in-demand botanical skills to support training for student-to-professional transition. Poster at American Society of Plant Biologists Conference. 22-26 June 2024.

Progress 04/15/23 to 04/14/24

Outputs
Target Audience:Undergraduate students at 4-year institutions, professors, and deans at colleges of agriculture were targeted. Undergraduate students were targeted because they are the focal point of the project and provided critical data to understand the current landscape of colleges of agriculture. Faculty were targeted because the data generated will provide insight on how to improve support for students, recruitment efforts, and retention rates. College and department administrators were targeted because they provided access to reaching students across programs simultaneously and the data will be important for them to support broad, programmatic changes across the college. Changes/Problems: Nothing Reported What opportunities for training and professional development has the project provided?As a postdoctoral fellowship project, Goal 1 above outlines the professional development objectives provided. During the course of her fellowship, the Fellow became interested in career development and focused a significant amount of time reading the existing literature, writing grants to evaluate career development in the agricultural and botanical sectors, and contributing to manuscript. How have the results been disseminated to communities of interest?In her pursuit to gain experience and expertise in career development, the Fellow became involved in a project evaluating the alignment between academia and non-academic career sectors in the context of plant science. This resulted in a pair of publications in Plants, People, Planet as well as a poster accepted for the American Society of Plant Biologists Conference What do you plan to do during the next reporting period to accomplish the goals?Goal 1: Walsh will be interviewing at numerous Federal Agencies in the DC area to be placed as a AAAS Science and Technology Policy Fellow. This will further challenge her networking and communication skills. Walsh will attend the AAEA Conference to increase her networking of PIs working in the rural space. Goal 2: Walsh will continue analyzing her data, leveraging her new mentoring relationship with MM4DBER PI and Co-PI. The drafted survey instrument for Goal 3 will be handed off to another postdoctoral researcher within the Education Research and Outreach Lab at Danforth. This researcher has experience researching minors and validating instruments. It is Walsh's hope that her colleague can validate the survey.

Impacts
What was accomplished under these goals? Goal 1: The Postdoctoral Fellow was selected as a Mixture Modeling for Discipline-based Education Research (MM4DBER) Fellow, an NSF-funded training program that enabled her to learn how to use mixture modeling and consider how the data collected for this project could be analyzed using mixture models (Objective 1.1: gain technical skills). It also introduced her to other early career researchers, fostering networking opportunities. The Fellow gained experience identifying and recruiting participants for the project by crafting a template to communicate with deans and other administrative staff. The Fellow emailed representatives from over 80 Colleges of Agriculture and the heads of 35 agriculture departments for institutions that did not have a College of Agriculture (Objective 1.2: gain networking skills). In November 2023, the Postdoctoral Fellow applied the technical, networking, and communication skills she had been developing to apply to be an American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) Science & Technology Fellow. In January 2024, she was selected to be a semi-finalist and presented a 1-page memo responding to an Executive Order as part of the continued selection process. She was selected as a finalist in March 2024. Goal 2:The validated survey developed in the first year of the project was disseminated nationwide, yielding 1624 undergraduate responses after the dataset was cleaned (Objective 2.3). Quantitative analysis is underway. Goal 3: In the first year of the project, a survey for high school students was written to address Goal 3. During the project, the postdoctoral fellow learned about the complexity of survey validation, especially with minors. As a result, this goal was tabled to prioritize Goal 2.

Publications

• Type: Conference Papers and Presentations Status: Accepted Year Published: 2024 Citation: Walsh, L.L., K. Parsley, M. McCartney, A. Hove, H. Liu, B. Sidoti, E. Wester, and K. Callis-Duehl. 2024. Identifying in-demand botanical skills to support training for student-to-professional transition. Poster at American Society of Plant Biologists Conference. 22-26 June 2024.
• Type: Peer Reviewed Journal Articles Status: Published Year Published: 2023 Citation: Sidoti, B. J., Parsley, K. M., Walsh, L. L., Callis-Duehl, K., Hove, A., Liu, H., Bruce-Opris, H., Gonzalez, R., Ospina, D., Uzcategui, M., Baraloto, C., & McCartney, M. (2023). Characterizing the landscape of plant science careers in the United States I: Government and private sector perspectives. Plants, People, Planet, (6). https://doi.org/10.1002/ppp3.10375.
• Type: Peer Reviewed Journal Articles Status: Published Year Published: 2023 Citation: Walsh, L. L., Parsley, K. M., Sidoti, B. J., Callis-Duehl, K., Hove, A. A., Liu, H., Bruce-Opris, H., Gonzalez, R., Ospina, D., Uzcategui, M., Baraloto, C., & McCartney, M. (2023). Characterizing the landscape of plant science careers in the United States II: Academic perspectives. Plants, People, Planet. https://doi.org/10.1002/ppp3.10374

Progress 04/15/22 to 04/14/23

Outputs
Target Audience:Undergraduate students at 4-year institutions, professors, and deans at colleges of agriculture were targeted. Undergraduate students were targeted because they are the focal point of the project and provided critical data to understand the current landscape of colleges of agriculture. Faculty were targeted because the data generated will provide insight on how to improve support for students, recruitment efforts, and retention rates. Deans were targeted because they provide access to reaching students across programs simultaneously and the data will be important for them to support broad, programmatic changes across the college. When creating a survey to understand high school students' interest in and perception of agriculture, the targeted audience included agricultural extension officers and outreach coordinators. Once validated, the survey will allow this audience to evaluate the impact various programs have on pre-collegiate students. Changes/Problems:A delay occurred in the first year when the project was put on hiatus for the Fellow's maternity leave. Additionally, due to health concerns stemming from the COVID-19 pandemic in 2022, the pregnant Fellow opted not to attend a conference in the first year of the project, so there was no travel expenditure in Year 1. We expect this to lead to a no-cost-extension of the project to be submitted. After significant research and literature review, there were no appropriate, published resources available to build off of when developing a survey to gauge student perceptions of agriculture. Because of that, the high school survey had to be built from scratch and will require extensive time and money to validate. This process has been de-prioritized until the necessary funds can be acquired, especially because more financial incentives were required for validating the undergraduate survey than originally expected. What opportunities for training and professional development has the project provided?This project allowed the Fellow to purchase and consult American Educational Research Association (AERA's) Standards for Educational and Psychological Testing to develop and validate surveys for the project. After drafting an email requesting participation from deans, the Fellow received feedback from her advisor on communicating with higher education administrators to incentivize action. The Fellow used her project and data collected to apply to be a Mixture Modeling for Discipline-based Education Research (MM4DBER) Fellow, an NSF-funded training program. How have the results been disseminated to communities of interest?As described above, major results and summary statistics from College of Agriculture undergraduate students from two R1 land-grant universities (one Midwestern, one Southeastern) were distributed to their dean's offices by email. What do you plan to do during the next reporting period to accomplish the goals?The validated undergraduate survey and data collected from two schools will be submitted to a peer-reviewed, open access journal. The Fellow has applied to present the results at AAAS in early 2024. The dataset of colleges and universities that offer agricultural degrees will be used to identify Deans and department chair contact information. These administrators will be contacted in September to distribute the validated survey to their students. Qualitative data will be analyzed using training received in Year 2 from the AERA Professional Development Course: Text Classification for the Pursuit of Truth with Qualitative Evidence: No-Code Machine Learning Via Latent Code Identification. Quantitative data will be analyzed using the training and mentorship that the Fellow receives from MM4DBER. Results from the survey and the landscape analysis will be submitted to a peer-reviewed, open access journal. After financial incentives have been distributed for the undergraduates surveyed in Fall 2023, the remaining budget will be used to best advance the high school survey to validation. Because the survey was created from scratch, it will require more students to participate than originally expected. Additional funds will be sought to help complete the high school project.

Impacts
What was accomplished under these goals? Demand for agricultural and food scientists is growing, but the demographic makeup of this workforce does not yet represent the general U.S. population's diversity. With rural populations declining, agricultural programs must adapt to attract a changing demographic. To address the potential stall in growing our agricultural workforce, this project is developing education research tools to help agricultural programs assess students' interest to help with recruitment and retention. The surveys developed and data generated from this project will help inform college administrators and outreach/extension office directors, allowing them to make data-informed decisions to improve programming and institutional support. Ultimately, the policy changes made will improve the college experience and workforce preparation for undergraduate students. Goal 1: The project's first goal is to provide an opportunity to the Fellow to receive appropriate postdoctoral training to enter the federal workforce. The Fellow refined her technical skills by gaining experience validating a survey and developing a survey from scratch (Objective 1.1). This included six iterations of survey development for the undergraduate survey (details can be found in Goal 2 section). The Fellow gained experience identifying contributors and participants for the project (Objective 1.2). Five institutions were contacted by the fellow for participation during the validation process (details can be found in Goal 2 section). The Fellow refined her communication skills with college deans (Objective 1.3). Two deans from research-intensive universities were successfully contacted to distribute surveys for validation to their student bodies. After preliminary data was analyzed, a summary sheet of results was sent to both deans by the Fellow. Goal 2: The project's second goal is to assess the current state of undergraduate education in agriculture. Published undergraduate surveys were extensively reviewed and modified by the Fellow to create an undergraduate survey for college of agriculture students composed of four sections: student motivations, student limitations/barriers, career resources, and demographic questions (Objective 2.1). After development, the survey was validated as described below (Objective 2.2). Two drafts of the survey were reviewed by the Fellow's advisor and lab. The survey was then distributed to 21 REU interns at the Donald Danforth Plant Science Center and approximately 110 University of Missouri Saint Louis students for feedback on the clarity of questions. Five comments were provided by students, including two issues of clarity, two issues that were intentionally vague or too specific to be addressed, and one correction to make a question "select all" formatted. The survey was then distributed to a set of Lindenwood University students in a biology course to determine the approximate time it would take students to complete the survey without the clarity questions. Based on the feedback from the three student groups, it was determined that the survey could be advertised as a 15-minute survey. The quantitative questions required additional investigation to ensure that the questions measured their intended student characteristics. With the help of college of agriculture deans, the survey was deployed to their undergraduate students at a Midwestern research-intensive land-grant university and a Southeastern research-intensive land-grant university. A total of 271 Midwestern responses and 362 Southeastern responses were obtained after data cleaning. Confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) with maximum likelihood estimation was performed to evaluate the structure of the modified career resource questionnaire (do responses to questions that measure a given career resource cluster together?). CFA results strongly support the survey questions consisting of four factors (job market awareness, soft skills, organizational support, career clarity), as was expected. Collectively, the career resource factors selected demonstrate evidence of validity to use as a means to evaluate the career development that students are receiving from their college program. All four constructs were positively correlated with the student's satisfaction in the major. As would be expected, job market knowledge is positively related to whether a student could name an employer. The soft skills and organizational support students receive are also related to whether a student considered leaving their major. That is, if they were not receiving soft skills and organizational support, you would expect them to question their major. The career resource factor with the fewest significant relationships with the external variables was career clarity, which is the most "individual/personal" of the career factors included. This factor would be the least malleable by the institution, and would rely more on an individual's purposeful action, so this is not surprising. The results from the two participating schools were compiled and sent to both dean's offices (Objective 2.4). Below is an excerpt from that communication. From the preliminary analysis, there are three results we would like to highlight. In their responses to the career research questionnaire, students from both schools scored the lowest on job market awareness, demonstrating a topic worth additional attention in courses, department programming, and university activities such as career fairs. The strongest motivators for both universities' students when choosing a major were career-based, rather than familial or psychological. Finally, student satisfaction with their major was positively associated with their career resource factors, suggesting that as a department improves its career development, it will recruit and retain more students to the program. Based on quantitative students about their personal motivations for choosing their major, "A career in this major allows me to help others" was the most popular motivation in both schools (average MW = 3.533, SE = 3.456 out of 4). Parent/guardian was the most influential figure for both sets of students, although this influence was low (average MW = 2.78, SE = 2.659 out of 5). The most common pre-collegiate activity to influence students was an agriculture or life science related hobby (MW = 2.767, SE = 3.327 out of 5). Compared to influential figures, department characteristics, marketing material, and personal experiences/extracurriculars, career opportunities were more influential to students when selecting their major. Future job market of the career (MW = 4.119, SE= 4.072 out of 5) and opportunities to work with people (MW = 4.081, SE = 4.097, out of 5) were the most influential. A dataset of colleges of agriculture was created in preparation to disseminate the survey nationwide in Fall 2023 (Objective 2.3). Goal 3: The project's third goal is to evaluate how different exposure levels to ag science impact pre-collegiate youth in their value of and interest in ag science. To the Fellow's knowledge, no survey instruments have been developed to measure value or interest in ag science. Therefore, an exhaustive literature review was conducted to create a survey instrument that can be deployed to measure pre-collegiate student's 1) Perception of Agriculture; 2) Career Perception and Interest; and 3) Ag science interest (Objective 3.2). Feedback was provided to the Fellow by the Danforth Center's Education Research & Outreach Lab, as well as two Illinois Extension officers.

Publications