The Graduate Student/Postdoc Research Symposium at FFPER

Benedikt Harrer, San José State University

At this year’s eighth biennial “Foundations and Frontiers in Physics Education Research” conference (FFPER), the Graduate Student/Postdoc Research Symposium (GSPRS) was held for the fourth time at an FFPER. The GSPRS, which first took place at the fifth FFPER in 2013 as an offering just for graduate students (see Fall 2013 FEd Newsletter), is a professional development opportunity for graduate student and postdoc conference participants, allowing them to have drafts of their scholarly writing critiqued by peers and faculty mentors. In 2013, I participated in the GSRS as a graduate student. This year, six years later, I was a mentor for my own “pod” of graduate students.

As a fourth-year graduate student planning to write up a part of my dissertation for publication in Physical Review (Special Topics) Physics Education Research, I was eager to participate in the symposium to get feedback on an early draft. My first task as a participant in a “pod” of three graduate students was to submit a PERC-proceedings-style version of my paper to the organizers of the symposium. Shortly thereafter, we received copies of all three papers with the instructions to write reviews for our pod-mates’ papers. How we wrote the reviews was up to us, but we were encouraged to provide “constructive criticism aimed at improving the paper and the research it describes, not to judge its readiness for publication.”

A little while after I had sent in my reviews, we received an email from our pod mentor, Edward “Joe” Redish. In his email, Joe explained that – mirroring common practice among journal editors – he was not going to provide further commentary as our “editor;” instead, he would let the reviews stand on their own. However, he did give us further guidance on what to do now that we had received our reviews: We were instructed to “look at [our] reviews and decide if they legitimately point to any things in [our] presentation that [we] should fix,” then fix those issues, and finally think about how we would respond if we were to write back to the editor of a journal. Joe encouraged us to “be cautious about writing your reviewer off as an idiot,” since there was always a possibility that we weren’t sufficiently clear in our papers. In addition, he explained that reviewers are typically drawn from our intended audience, and that if they don’t get what we’re trying to say, that’s good information that should inform our revisions.

At the conference, we then each had 30 minutes to share and discuss our work. During the first ten minutes, we used prepared slides to summarize our papers and refresh everybody’s memories. The remaining time was used to discuss the paper, the reviews, and the overall review process. At this point, I had already submitted my paper to Phys Rev, but the experience of directly interacting with the reviewers of my earlier draft helped me understand where readers might still get confused in the paper. Writing responses to my pod-mates and discussing these responses face-to-face was also great practice that prepared me well for revising my paper and writing my response to the Phys Rev reviewers only two weeks after FFPER had ended. A month after the conference, my paper was accepted for publication.

After this great experience many years ago, I was delighted when I received an email from the FFPER organizers, asking if I’d be interested in being a mentor for my own GSPRS pod at this year’s conference. Of course, I said yes! My pod was to consist of four graduate students and a postdoc. This year’s process was more structured than back when I had participated as a graduate student. Instead of asking participants to write reviews however they saw fit, specific guidelines were provided this time around. Participants were asked to read Rachel Scherr’s excellent article on “Writing good negative reviews” (first published in the PERCoGS Newsletter for April 2014), which lays out a structure for how to approach reviewing a paper, along with the general recommendation to write reviews as if writing a letter to the authors. In addition, the guidelines for this year’s GSPRS suggested comments that might help make a review generative, rather than judgmental (e.g., “When you say .... I’m not sure if you mean _ or __,” or “This transition is confusing to me. The last paragraph sets up and then you suddenly pivot to _”). Another change was to have participants submit their papers as Google Docs (in addition to formatted PDFs) where reviewers could leave comments and even comment on other reviewers’ comments. During the review process, the manuscripts were only shared with reviewers. Authors were invited to view comments only after the review process was concluded.

As the pod mentor, I was asked to synthesize the peer reviews for each paper and provide my own commentary. Once I had received all reviews, I wrote up “decision letters” as if I was acting as a journal editor, summarizing the main points of the peer reviews (especially where the reviews converged) and adding “editorial guidance” on which of the reviewers’ comments to prioritize in revisions to the papers. I also compiled all reviews and marked-up manuscripts in folders for each of the pod members and shared those folders with them for review in preparation for our in-person meeting at FFPER.

At the conference, we had a 90-minute session to discuss each pod member’s work and reflect on the overall review process. Each author was asked to summarize their paper in one sentence to remind everybody of the topic and then discuss the reviews they received. I encouraged them to ask clarifying questions about the reviews of their manuscripts (a rare opportunity given that the review process is typically anonymous), respond to individual feedback, and synthesize the reviews they had received. An utterly respectful and productive conversation ensued, during which we dove deeply into issues of adequately describing study setting, theoretical framework, methodology, and data analysis in scientific papers.

Getting to experience the Graduate Student/Postdoc Research Symposium at FFPER first as a graduate student and then as a mentor, I was able to pay forward the mentorship I received years ago, using what I learned from the symposium as a graduate student and from my experience publishing in scientific journals since then. The additional structure and scaffolding have further improved the experience, I think, both for the participants and for us mentors. I highly recommend the GSPRS to all graduate students and postdocs attending FFPER in future years, and I encourage the more senior attendees interested in sharing their experiences with the publishing world to volunteer as mentors.

Benedikt Harrer is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at San José State University.

Disclaimer – The articles and opinion pieces found in this issue of the APS Forum on Education Newsletter are not peer refereed and represent solely the views of the authors and not necessarily the views of the APS.