Presentation 1
4 - A Team Science Community Toolkit: A Co-Developed Approach to Open Science Up to Community Organizations
Presented by: Madison Hartstein, Northwestern University
Authored by: Stephanie Schmitz Bechteler, Chicago Urban League
Kareem Butler, Chicago Appleseed Center for Fair Courts
Elyse Daly, Northwestern University
Ontisar Freelain, Health Research and Awareness NFP
Joanne Glenn, W.O.T. Foundation
Arielle Guzmán, Chicago Medical Organization for Latino Advancement
Madison Hartstein, Northwestern University
Tessneem S. Hasan, Northwestern University
Candace Henley, The Blue Hat Foundation
TaLana Hughes, Sickle Cell Disease Association of Illinois
Angela E. Jordan, University of South Alabama
Rana K. Mazzetta, Northwestern University
David A. Moskowitz, University of Chicago
Megha A. Patel, Northwestern University
Heather J. Risser, Northwestern University
Sheila Sanders. Northwestern University
Bonnie Spring, Northwestern University
Héctor Torres, Colibri Counseling
Kimberly M. Williams, Erie Family Health Centers

Background
To redress health disparities, there is a need to extend the scope and application of Team Science beyond the academic biomedical sciences to include other key domain experts: Community Organizations (COs).

Problem
Although the importance of Community-Engaged Research (CER) has become well-recognized in theory, in practice, successful engagement in CER continues to be thwarted by an absence of established bridges to practical partnerships. Imbalances in power, information, and resources in CO and academic partnerships constrain the contribution of CO's voice and expertise; thereby impeding development of a shared mental model that incorporates both scientific and real-world knowledge. 

Activities/Methods
To facilitate more insightful productive community-academic research partnerships, we co-created the first, public-facing Team Science Community Toolkit. We co-designed the toolkit with community partners to level the playing field and reduce the hindrance of unfamiliarity with scientific jargon, grant finances, and research methodology. It is intended to create a bridge that invites citizen scientists from the community into the biomedical research endeavor to better address persistent health disparities. During needs assessment qualitative interviews, CO staff suggested that learning more about how the research process works and having tools to support them throughout a scientific project could restore balance and provide greater agency for the CO.

We assembled a diverse project team of community and academic partners to co-develop all content and tools. We utilized a community based participatory research (CBPR) approach, grounded in the principles of the Science of Team Science (SciTS) and User-Centered Design (UCD). The resulting toolkit includes templates, checklists, and interactive tools to support collaborative decision-making and communication. A real-world simulation takes users through the five stages of the research process, introduces all tools, and provides context for their application.

To validate the concept, content, and usability of the toolkit, we conducted focus groups and usability testing with community experts outside of the project team. Participants expressed pride and enthusiasm to contribute, “we can actually influence it to be what we need” and “I’ve seen a lot of educational content that tries to be helpful, useful, and easy to use and this is the first one that I actually think is.”

To address community citizen scientists as full partners in the research effort, we integrated the toolkit as a module in the existing open-access COALESCE (teamscience.net) platform. Created to facilitate communication and research collaborations between scientists from different disciplines, COALESCE’s modules have been used by 50,000+ individuals worldwide. Inclusion of the community toolkit in the platform invites COs into the research discussion and exposes academic and community partners to each others’ mental models. This presentation will demonstrate how to use the new toolkit, including some of its interactive components. Use-case applications will be described, and collaboration will be invited to evaluate the toolkit’s effectiveness.

Conclusion
The Team Science Community Toolkit is designed to empower self-advocacy and increase equity for Community Organizations engaging in research with academic partners. Many of the tools can be downloaded, customized, and deployed to foster productive communication in community-academic partnerships.

Presentation 2
23 - Developing Integration Skills in Convergent Engineering Teams
Presented by: Theresa Lant, Pace University
Authored by: Susan Day, University of Louisville
Theresa Lant, Pace University

Our research explores how engineering investigators learn and apply integrative skills in larger, multi-university convergent engineering research programs including the non-technical components of collaboration. One of the challenges for engineering investigators, with their high-consensus research disciplinarity, is to understand standards of practice for low-consensus research domains like the social sciences(1). Engineering research has generally thrived in the context of multidisciplinarity, in a supply chain fashion, across the fine fields of engineering with some lesser measure of system integration. However, high impact social science applications require a collaborative and comprehensive design process for conceptualizing integrative strategies across subsystems. In exceptional STEM education ecosystems in non-EPSCoR (2) states (e.g., Silicon Valley/ Stanford, Berkeley), through standards of practice developed to some degree through NSF funding, (e.g., IGERT/ NRT/ IUSE 3) a collaborative process between social scientists and STEM investigators occurs. With successful NRT programming, for example, investigators have opportunities to engage in research that tests a theory of change in human behavior across the non-technical components of research programs. In the low consensus social sciences, conceptualization of numerous program components (i.e., DEIA across the innovation ecosystem, designs for knowledge management, curriculum, and professional development, etc.) allow for numerous configurations for tailoring evidenced-based models and practices to the policy subsystem in which the research is embedded. STEM investigators who learn integrative skills are more likely to consistently apply theories of change across essential programmatic components, learn cognitive flexibility and maximizing impact.

Our research question centers on how engineers learn and apply integrative skills in convergent research programs. We have initial data using the NSF funded BRIDGES (4) survey from multi-university engineering research teams through an on-going collaboration with a collaborative robotics research institute funded in part through NSF EPSCoR funds. The BRIDGES survey measures the cognitive and social precursors to developing an integrative capacity (5). Through application of this survey, meeting transcripts, and interviews over time during the evolution of this project team, we will conduct a longitudinal investigation of how engineer investigators learn and apply integrative skills in convergent research programs. The work we propose to present at INSCiTS 2023 will describe the initial conditions of the teams engaged in this multi-institution collaborative effort, as demonstrated through survey responses, interviews, and meeting transcripts.

1. Borrego, M & Newswander, L, (2008) Characteristics of successful cross-disciplinary engineering education collaborations, Journal of Engineering Education, DOI: 10.1002/j.2168-9830.2008.tb00962.x
2. Established Program to Stimulate Competitive Research (EPSCOR) https://new.nsf.gov/funding/initiatives/epscor
3. National Science Foundation Research Traineeship Programs (NRT, IGERT); https://new.nsf.gov/funding/opportunities/national-science-foundation-research-traineeship https://new.nsf.gov/funding/opportunities/improving-undergraduate-stem-education-directorate (IUSE).
4. BRIDGES: Building Resources through Integrating Disciplines for Group Effectiveness in Science, NSF SciSIP, Award #1262754, PIs: Lant, T & Salazar, M.
5. Salazar, M., Lant, T., Fiore, S., & Salas, E., (2012) Integrative Capacity: A New Perspective for Understanding Interdisciplinary Team Processes and Outcomes," Small Group Research. October 2012 vol. 43, no. 5; 527-558

Presentation 3
27 - Evidence-based Longitudinal Assessment of Interprofessional Teamwork: Assessing team experience in an educational context
Presented by: Tony Lingham, Interaction Science
Authored by: Tony Lingham, Interaction Science
Tyler Reimschisel, Case Western Reserve University

We describe an interprofessional education (IPE) course in which 435 students in 72 teams work on community-based projects while learning teamwork content and skills. Students were from the following programs: Dental Medicine (76), Genetic Counseling (8), Medicine (215), Nursing (311), Nutrition (1), Physician Assistant (34), Psychology (4), Social Work (58), and Speech-language pathology (8). A total of 40 sponsoring organizations with 83 community leaders (“champions”), 40 classroom instructors, and 28 faculty. The student teams collaborated with the champions on authentic projects designed by the champions. We employed a longitudinal, mixed-methods design to assess the experience of team interaction (i.e., pre-post design). Since the teams were embedded in a larger system, we chose a 360-degree assessment for the student teams. The team-level assessments focus on the lived experience of interprofessional team members (internal to the team), the team’s assessment of their outcomes based on their perception of working together (internal to the team), and the assessment from the champions (external assessment). We used the Team Learning Inventory or TLI (a 360 team-level assessment) together with a structured team coaching process to provide evidence-based team development from Time 1 and Time 2. Team coaching was provided to each team immediately after Time 1. The TLI was selected as the assessment tool because for almost two decades the TLI combined with structured team coaching has shown strong validity, reliability, and robustness with teams across all levels of diverse organizations in different countries and cultures. Four major dimensions of the experience of teamwork are assessed using the TLI:

1. Diverging Dimension (5 aspects),
2. Converging Dimension (3 aspects);
3. Power and Influence Dimension; and
4. Openness Dimension.

By forming partnerships among the education, practice, and research communities, this unique design for an IPE experience ensured that the IPE course focused on evidence-based team development. Based on exploratory analysis from the first year of the course, the teams that indicated in the goals and action steps of their coaching session that they wanted to improve in specific dimensions and/or aspects of team interaction showed improvements across all dimensions and/or aspects that were indicated in the teams’ learning plans with a range from 3.1% - 36.9%, including 33.8 % improving in the Power and Influence Dimension, 36.9% improving in the Planning aspect of the Converging Dimension, and 30.8% improving in the Relationality aspect of the Diverging Dimension. Champions’ ratings from 10 questions (1-7 response rating) of their experience with the team had an average of 5.8 – 6.2 for each question (Time 1) and 6.0 – 6.4 (Time 2) showing an improvement from the champions’ assessments of their experience working with the teams post the team coaching. The evidence of improvement in team interaction is promising as our focus is to develop High-Impact Teams (HITs) demonstrated by the team’s internal dynamics and functionality as well as the benefit the student team project has on the champion’s organization.

Presentation 4
34 - Interdisciplinary Graduate Student Reflections on Transdisciplinary Team Science Training
Presented by: Deborah DiazGranados, Virginia Commonwealth University
Authored by: Deborah DiazGranados, Virginia Commonwealth University
Stephen Fiore, University of Central Florida
Troy Hartley, William & Mary

Solving today's most challenging societal problems requires innovative breakthroughs and novel solutions that transcend disciplines, reaching a deeper level of knowledge integration. However, achieving such integration through team science is challenging due to the lack of adequate training. To address this, methods from allied disciplines need to be adapted for use in training future transdisciplinary researchers. This presentation discusses team science training focused on coastal resilience. It brings together a multidisciplinary team of scholars focused on improving problem solving and teamwork in science.

First, a team of faculty coaches was recruited to guide a class of diverse doctoral and master's students from the natural and physical coastal, marine and environmental sciences, engineering, design, and social and economic sciences. Second, to develop and test different types of transdisciplinary pedagogies, a series of workshops was developed to train students on the fundamentals of team science as well as collaborative knowledge building on complex transdisciplinary problems. We emphasized the development of conceptual models that are capable of capturing system level problems as well as integrating diverse disciplinary perspectives. Third, to foster individual and team learning, an intervention focusing on reflection in teamwork processes was used to ensure students monitor both the task of transdisciplinary problem solving, as well as the teamwork processes engaged while collaborating.

Graduate students were introduced to the principles of team science, collaborative problem solving, and effective self-reflective tools and strategies. Additionally, students gained experience working with coastal community partners (e.g., municipalities, NGOs). As such, this community-based climate-resilience project enabled students to practice team science research and use reflective practices to improve their competencies with various stakeholders. Assessment of team processes, along with reflections on teamwork and taskwork, were used to highlight areas of collaboration needing improvement.

For this presentation we first provide an overview of the project and follow this with results from the first cohort of graduate student teams. In addition to attitudinal and knowledge based surveys, team members also provided diary type reflections. We focus on these team reflections where they describe their experiences in collaborative knowledge building and problem solving sessions. These reflections were based on prompts designed to helps students consider their experience in teamwork and in taskwork and what they found challenging. Additionally, they reflected on what they learned about interdisciplinarity teamwork and taskwork. Analyses of reflections following their initial phases of collaboration showed that the students were initially challenged by the lack of awareness of team members expertise and knowledge from other disciplines. They were similarly challenged by the scope of the work and temporal dynamics of the different research methods. Analyses of reflections following intense problem solving sessions found that teams were gaining awareness of how to utilize the diversity of disciplines while better understanding team roles. Additionally, they reported gaining an awareness of location-based taskwork and variations in timing of the work when tasks differed in scale. We discuss these and related findings and how the project evolved to better address the team science training needs of the graduate students.