Washington State University Partners to Enhance Faculty-Led Public Impact Research

Seeking to increase the societal impact of scientific research, Washington State University has joined a multi-year collaborative effort led by the Association of Public and Land-grant Universities to identify and promulgate new approaches to support faculty and researchers undertaking Public Impact Research. Known as PIR, it’s a framework for university research that improves lives and serves society.

WSU’s pilot project focuses on expanding concepts, metrics, and evaluation practices to include a range of scholarship valued as impactful and legitimate by the institution. Originating out the university’s cluster hire program on Racism and Social Inequality in the Americas, this project focuses on community-engaged scholarship that is predominantly conducted by women scholars and scholars of color.

The WSU pilot will:

• develop an evaluative framework for community-engaged research
• design a workshop to help community-engaged scholars learn how to narrate their impact for evaluation purposes
• And, pilot an internal community-engaged scholarship review committee that can contribute recommendations to promotion and tenure portfolios.

Project activities will feature collaboration between the Office of the Provost, the Vice Chancellor for Equity and Inclusive Excellence, the Associate Dean for Faculty in the College of Arts & Sciences, and the Associate Vice Chancellor for Research Advancement and Partnerships.

The effort, called Supporting Public Impact Research through Institutional Transformation (SPIRIT), is funded by the National Science Foundation. In addition to WSU, the SPIRIT effort also will work with the University of California, Davis; Pennsylvania State University; and the University of Texas at San Antonio.

“Public research universities have a rich tradition of working with their communities to tackle vexing challenges through research and community engagement, but too many barriers can still stand in the way of greater impact,” said Dr. Jessica Bennett, assistant vice Ppresident of STEM education at APLU and a co-principal investigator on the project. “We know one longstanding hurdle to greater faculty engagement in Public Impact Research can be a narrow focus on faculty evaluation and assessment. By working with institutions that want to broaden their assessment practices to provide greater incentives for PIR work, we’re aiming to identify and elevate additional institutional paths for enhanced public impact.”

“This project presents a promising development in increasing the currently limited empirical evidence on the effectiveness of different institutional change efforts to support public-impact research,” said Dr. Jennifer Renick, assistant professor of Counseling, Educational Psychology and Research at the University of Memphis and a co-principal investigator on the project. “I’m very excited about the potential of our findings helping to advance public-impact research at many universities across the country.”

APLU will work with partner institutions to:

• Understand strategies to support faculty engaging in PIR through campus pilot projects.
• Generate cross-campus learning through a facilitated community.
• Elevate learning from SPIRIT to other practitioners and university leaders through convenings, workshops, and toolkits.
• Engage in mutual knowledge exchange with related national efforts, projects, and organizations through engagement with national knowledge partners (ADVANCE Partnership: Strategic Partnership for Alignment of Community Engagement in STEM, Advancing Research Impact in Society, Association of Research Libraries, Promotion and Tenure in Innovation & Entrepreneurship, Pew Charitable Trusts’ Evidence Project.