Exercises — Chapter 17: NSF Grants

Work these with a real or planned science/engineering/STEM-education project in mind. If your work is biomedical (NIH territory) or non-research, do Parts A and M anyway and treat Parts B–C as transferable practice — the two-criteria discipline and the broader-impacts planning skill apply to a growing number of funders.

How to use these: Part A checks recall; Part B applies the chapter to concrete NSF decisions; Part C asks you to create at the level a real NSF applicant must (a labeled Project Summary, a genuine Broader Impacts plan); Part M interleaves earlier chapters. Answers to selected exercises (★) are in the back matter.

Part A — Recall and Understand

A1. ★ Name the NSF's two merit-review criteria and define each in one sentence. Which one do applicants most often under-invest in, and why is that a mistake?

A2. What is the PAPPG, and what can happen to a proposal that violates its formatting or required-section rules?

A3. Describe the required structure of the NSF Project Summary. What three labeled elements must it contain?

A4. ★ Contrast the NSF's review rating scale and funding decision with the NIH's. Who makes the NSF funding recommendation, and what besides the reviews do they weigh?

A5. Define: directorate, division, program, program officer (rotator), panel review, CAREER award, GRFP.

A6. List four distinct kinds of broader impacts the NSF recognizes (beyond "disseminate results").

A7. What does it mean that the NSF GRFP is "portable" and "awarded to the student," and how does that differ from the NIH F31?

Part B — Apply

B1. ★ Diagnose the broader impacts. For each, say whether it's a checkbox or a genuine plan, and how to strengthen it: - (a) "Findings will be disseminated through publications and conference presentations." - (b) "We will partner with [a named regional teachers' network] to co-develop three classroom modules from our data, pilot them in six schools, and measure teacher adoption and student engagement with an external evaluator." - (c) "The project will broaden participation by recruiting diverse students." - (d) "We will release our dataset and analysis code as open, documented infrastructure that other labs in the field can build on, and track downstream reuse."

B2. Right program, right time. You've drafted a proposal and aren't sure which NSF program fits. Describe the concrete steps you'd take to identify the program, confirm fit, and learn the submission window — and explain why doing this before writing matters.

B3. ★ Write the labeled summary. For your project, draft a one-page Project Summary with the three labeled blocks (Overview, Intellectual Merit, Broader Impacts). Make the Broader Impacts block as specific as the Intellectual Merit block.

B4. Read the decision. A proposal earns mostly "Very Good" and "Excellent" panel ratings but is declined; a scientifically comparable one is funded. Give two plausible NSF-specific reasons (not "the science was worse"), drawing on program-officer discretion and the portfolio.

B5. Integrate, don't staple. You're writing a CAREER proposal. Take your research topic and sketch one genuinely integrated research-and-education vision (where each feeds the other), and contrast it with the "stapled" version (strong research + a generic new course).

Part C — Analyze and Create

C1. ★ Build a real Broader Impacts plan. For your project, produce a one-page Broader Impacts plan with: specific activities; the beneficiaries and partners; the budget lines and timeline that resource them; and an evaluation plan (what you'll measure and how you'll know it worked). This goes in your "My Proposal" document.

C2. Two-criteria audit. Take a draft (yours or a colleague's) and audit it against both criteria: highlight every sentence that serves Intellectual Merit in one color and Broader Impacts in another. Where is the proposal lopsided? What would you add or cut to make the two genuinely co-equal?

C3. ★ Critique and rewrite a Project Summary. Find or construct a Project Summary that reads like a journal abstract (no labeled criteria). Explain the compliance and competitiveness problems, then rewrite it into a compliant, competitive labeled summary.

C4. Broadening participation without tokenism. Draft a broadening-participation broader impact for your project that has the three features from Section 17.5 (real partners, genuine activities with a rationale, evaluation). If you cannot do it genuinely, pick a different broader-impacts category you can do genuinely and justify the switch.

C5. NSF vs. NIH translation. Take a project that could plausibly go to either agency (or imagine one) and sketch how the same work would be framed differently for the NIH (Chapter 16) versus the NSF — mechanism/program, signature page, and especially how societal benefit is handled.

Part M — Mixed and Interleaved Review

M1. ★ (Ch 16 + 17) Build the NIH-vs-NSF contrast table from memory: domain, review unit, scoring, who decides funding, signature criterion, signature page, resubmission, early-career flagship. Then state the one meta-skill both chapters teach.

M2. (Ch 9 + 17) How does the Intellectual Merit criterion map onto the significance-and-approach craft of Chapter 9, and how does the pitfalls-and-alternatives move help your merit rating?

M3. ★ (Ch 14 + 17) Explain how Broader Impacts is, in part, "dissemination and societal benefit made into a graded criterion." Why must a Data Management Plan and an open-data commitment (Chapter 14) be treated as substantive at the NSF?

M4. (Ch 10 + 17) Apply the evaluation thinking of Chapter 10 to a Broader Impacts plan: what would outputs, outcomes, and indicators look like for a broadening-participation activity?

M5. (Ch 2 + 17) The program officer is even more central at the NSF than the NIH. Connect this to the "thinking like a funder" and cultivation lessons of Chapter 2, and describe the right way to make first contact.

M6. (Ch 11–12 + 17) Why must a Broader Impacts plan show up in the budget and justification, not just the narrative? What does its absence from the budget signal to a reviewer?

🪞 Metacognitive check-in. Be honest: when you drafted your Broader Impacts plan (B3/C1), did you feel it was real work you're committed to, or a performance to satisfy reviewers? The NSF can tell the difference, and so can you. If it felt hollow, that's information — either find a broader impact you genuinely believe in and can execute, or examine the resistance itself. Crossing the threshold (broader impacts is half the proposal) is as much an attitude shift as a writing skill.