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There is a growing interest within higher education to engage with students as partners to reposition students from consumers to producers of knowledge. The purpose of this study was to gather insights into the benefits, barriers/challenges, and best practices for engaging in student-faculty partnership activities for science faculty members. Supervising or working with graduate teaching assistants, working with students on university committees, collaborating with undergraduate or graduate students on a new or existing research project, and co-authoring manuscripts with graduate students were regarded as the most impactful partnership activities. Common benefits of student partnership activities included: collaboration and relationship building, broadening perspectives and gaining feedback, personal satisfaction, and institutional and career-related benefits. Common barriers/challenges reported were interpersonal dynamics and maintaining relationships, student management, and external influences. Best practices consisted of planning and setting expectations, developing students' agency, using open communication, and facilitating peer-to-peer collaboration and peer mentoring.

There is growing support for the use of student-faculty partnerships within higher education. Successful partnerships capable of sustainable transformation require the presence of several underlying values held by both faculty and students. The purpose of this study was to examine differences in the perceptions of student-faculty partnership values across science faculty, graduate students, and undergraduate students and determine whether these values differ by partnership category. Faculty and students responded to the Student-Staff Partnership Questionnaire (Martens et al., 2019), which included five scales aimed to assess values for successful student partnerships: reciprocal respect, influence, autonomy, commitment, and partnership. Our findings suggest that faculty perceive themselves as aligning with the values of reciprocal respect, influence, autonomy, and partnership to a higher degree than undergraduate and graduate students perceive faculty as adhering to them. No differences in values were noted across partnership categories. Implications for higher education are discussed.