Web Articles
Strategic Questioning Manual
In these days of constant change, and the need for even more change if we are to live peacefully in a healthy environment, we ask ourselves: "How can our organization weather the tides of constant reorganization and restructuring and still maintain a clear vision of...
High Impact Practices and Historically Underrepresented Minority Students
For over a decade Kuh’s (2008) work on the critical importance of engaged learning has shaped the undergraduate college and university experience. Kuh dubbed these teaching and learning experiences High Impact Practices, and taking part in at least one of them at some...
Transparency Isn’t Spoon-Feeding: How a Transformative Approach to the Use of Explicit Assessment Criteria Can Support Student Self-Regulation
If little care is taken when establishing clear assessment requirements, there is the potential for spoon-feeding. However, in this conceptual article we argue that transparency in assessment is essential to providing equality of opportunity and promoting students’...
‘Black Lives Matter’ Without Black People?
Racial justice demonstrations have intensified following the Aug. 23 shooting of Jacob Blake, a 29-year-old Black man shot seven times in the back by a white police officer. This incident, which left Blake paralyzed, has revived national protests against anti-Black...
Recursive Processes in Self-Affirmation: Intervening to Close the Minority Achievement Gap
Abstract: A 2-year follow-up of a randomized field experiment previously reported in Science is presented. A subtle intervention to lessen minority students' psychological threat related to being negatively stereotyped in school was tested in an experiment conducted...
Expectations of brilliance underlie gender distributions across academic disciplines
Abstract: The gender imbalance in STEM subjects dominates current debates about women’s underrepresentation in academia. However, women are well represented at the Ph.D. level in some sciences and poorly represented in some humanities (e.g., in 2011, 54% of U.S....
Looking Back on a Life of Unacknowledged Privilege and a Call to Action
Abstract: The year 2020 provided a wake-up call about the role systemic racism plays in shaping our nation and shaping science. While hard work and great mentors helped bring me a long way from a farm in Minnesota, it’s become much clearer that the privilege of being...
Increased Structure and Active Learning Reduce the Achievement Gap in Introductory Biology
Abstract: Science, technology, engineering, and mathematics instructors have been charged with improving the performance and retention of students from diverse backgrounds. To date, programs that close the achievement gap between students from disadvantaged versus...
Does Rejection Hurt? An fMRI Study of Social Exclusion
Abstract: A neuroimaging study examined the neural correlates of social exclusion and tested the hypothesis that the brain bases of social pain are similar to those of physical pain. Participants were scanned while playing a virtual ball-tossing game in which they...
Selected Classroom Assessment Techniques (CATs) for Getting Feedback on Student Learning
“Classroom assessment helps individual college teachers obtain useful feedback on what, how much, and how well their students are learning. Faculty [and GSIs] can then use this information to refocus their teaching to help students make their learning more efficient...