TRIAGE: Techniques for Resolving Intragroup Conflict to Advance Graduate Education

This National Science Foundation Innovations in Graduate Education (IGE) award to Clemson University will test the effectiveness of novel approaches to educate a new generation of conflict-embracing science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) graduate students. As the challenges tackled by STEM professionals are increasingly complex and require wide ranging expertise, organizations often look to teams to generate creative, innovative solutions. Accordingly, graduate students entering today’s STEM workforce are expected to work on interdisciplinary, cross-functional, and demographically diverse teams. Although such teams have tremendous potential for innovation and creativity, diverse teams are at an increased risk of team conflict. Existing tools for building teamwork skills do not adequately address conflict management skills and rarely focus on the graduate student population. This award is focused on developing and testing new approaches to prepare graduate students as effective teammates by building conflict management skills to facilitate effective teamwork when they enter the workforce. Drawing from proven science on conflict management, this project focuses on developing a set of tools aimed at helping graduate students develop conflict management skills, assess conflict in their teams, and identify interventions to help their teams navigate conflict. Following their development, these tools will be piloted and evaluated amongst Clemson University STEM graduate students using an experimental approach. Once validated in the graduate population, the tools will be expanded to Clemson University undergraduate and graduate students across fields as well as students at Greenville Technical College. Students will begin with a day-long training program focused on constructive controversy, an approach aimed at improving teams’ ability to generate constructive, task-focused conflict. Following the training program, graduate students will participate in a novel dashboard-based approach to managing conflict in their research teams. Using data generated from surveys of graduate students’ research teams, dashboards will provide students with information about their team’s conflict and other teamwork processes alongside targeted interventions to implement within their teams. Once validated amongst STEM graduate students and expanded to undergraduate students at Clemson and technical college students at Greenville Technical College, the project will conclude with the creation of a set of transportable team conflict tools, including training materials and the dashboard’s interventions, which will be made accessible to the public online. The Innovations in Graduate Education (IGE) program is focused on research in graduate education. The goals of IGE are to pilot, test and validate innovative approaches to graduate education and to generate the knowledge required to move these approaches into the broader community. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.