Proactive strategies for an inclusive faculty search process.
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ABSTRACT:
SUBMITTER: Nguyen KH
PROVIDER: S-EPMC9203751 | biostudies-literature | 2022 Jun
REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature
Publications
Proactive strategies for an inclusive faculty search process.
Nguyen Karena H KH Thomas Kyle K Liu Robert C RC Corbett Anita H AH
Communications biology 20220616 1
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Project description:BackgroundAs higher education institutions strive to effectively support an increasingly diverse student body, they will be called upon to provide their faculty with tools to teach more inclusively, especially in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) classrooms where recruitment and retention of students from underrepresented and disadvantaged groups present long-standing challenges. Pedagogical training approaches to creating inclusive classrooms involve interventions that raise awareness of student and instructor social identities and explore barriers to learning, such as implicit bias, microaggressions, stereotype threat, and fixed mindset. Such efforts should focus on embracing diversity as an asset leveraged to benefit all students in their learning. In this paper, we describe the impact of multiday, off-campus immersion workshops designed to impart faculty with these tools. Based on analysis of workshop participant data, we report the resulting changes in faculty knowledge of factors affecting classroom climate and student success in STEM, attitudes about students, and motivation to adopt new teaching practices aimed at fostering equitable and culturally responsive learning environments.ResultsKey findings indicate that attendees (1) increased their knowledge of social identities and the barriers to learning in STEM classrooms, particularly those faced by students from underrepresented groups in STEM or socioeconomically challenged backgrounds; (2) changed their attitudes about students' abilities as science majors, shifting away from a fixed-mindset perspective in which characteristics, such as intelligence, are perceived as innate and unalterable; and (3) modified their teaching approaches to promote inclusivity and cultural responsiveness.ConclusionFaculty members, who are linchpins in the evolution of college classrooms into settings that provide students with equitable opportunities to succeed academically in STEM, can benefit from participating in immersion workshops structured to support their awareness of issues affecting classroom culture related to race/ethnicity, LGBTQ status, religious affiliation, ability, socioeconomic status, and other social identities that contribute to disparities in STEM achievement and persistence.
| S-EPMC7326892 | biostudies-literature
Project description:A compelling body of research suggests that students from racially marginalized and minoritized (RMM) backgrounds are systematically deterred from Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (STEM) fields when teachers and scientists create ideologically colorblind STEM learning environments where cultural differences are deemed irrelevant and disregard how race/ethnicity shapes students' experiences. We examine whether and how STEM faculty can serve as important sources of information that signal racial/ethnic diversity inclusion (or exclusion) that influence RMM students' motivation to persist in STEM. Specifically, we focus on RMM students' perceptions of their faculty research mentors' cultural awareness-the extent to which students believe that their faculty research mentor acknowledges and appreciates racial/ethnic differences in STEM research. Results from a longitudinal survey of RMM students (N = 150) participating in 74 faculty-led STEM research labs demonstrated that RMM students who perceived their faculty research mentor to be more culturally aware experienced more positive social climates in the lab and were more identified as scientists. Increased science identity, in turn, predicted their motivation to pursue STEM careers 3 months later. These findings demonstrate the importance of acknowledging, welcoming, and celebrating racial/ethnic diversity within STEM learning environments to broaden inclusive and equitable participation in STEM.
| S-EPMC11440733 | biostudies-literature
Project description:Faculty mentoring is relatively new in health sciences literature. Faculty mentors are considered to have multiple roles including being a supervisor, teacher, or a coach. Little or no attention to formal mentoring of faculty allows faculty to seek informal mentoring, creating a risk of unexpected outcome. There is dearth of literature with respect to formal mentoring programs from the subcontinent. Although, informal faculty mentoring has been in place but there is no standard faculty mentorship model to be followed at Aga Khan University Medical College (AKU-MC). An observational study was conducted in September 2021 at AKU MC with convenient sampling to share the perceptions of the AKU-MC faculty mentors in a faculty mentorship workshop so that further advanced level faculty development workshops could be planned in this area. Twenty-two faculty mentors participated to share their perspectives on the responsibilities of faculty mentor, faculty mentee and the institution to see faculty grow and to have a sustainable mentorship programme. Challenges faced by the faculty mentors during the process of mentorship were also discussed. Majority of the participants emphasized on the role of the faculty mentor to be supportive, guiding, reflective and formative (respond to the emotional needs, encourage, effective communication, know own limitations, observe, provide feedback). Faculty mentor role modeling, ability to maintain confidentiality, creating and maintaining mentor-mentee relationship, availability of framework of formal mentoring in an academic institution and opportunities within the academic setting to learn mentorship were the main challenges of being a faculty mentor. The process provided valuable training and education to the faculty for the development and strengthening of formal mentoring program. Faculty recommended that institutions should provide the opportunity for development of junior faculty mentors by organizing capacity building activities.
| S-EPMC10263330 | biostudies-literature
Project description:Background Despite emerging research on novel mobility solutions in urban areas, there have been few attempts to explore the relevance and sustainability of these solutions in rural contexts. Furthermore, existing research addressing rural mobility solutions typically focuses on a specific user group, such as local residents, second-home owners, or tourists. In this paper, we study the social inclusivity, economic viability, and environmental impacts of novel mobility solutions in rural contexts based on published scholarly literature. When doing so, we bring both permanent and temporary residents of rural areas under one research framework. Methods We used grey literature to identify and categorise novel mobility solutions, which have been applied in European rural areas and are suitable for travelling longer distances. By using six service flexibility variables, we reached four categories of novel mobility solutions: semi-flexible demand-responsive transport, flexible door-to-door demand-responsive transport, car-sharing, and ride-sharing. We analysed the social inclusivity, economic viability, and environmental impacts of those categories based on criteria and evidence identified from scholarly literature by including the perspectives of both permanent and temporary residents of rural areas. Results Our findings revealed that while single novel mobility solutions are seldom applicable for all rural travellers, strong spatial and temporal synergies exist when combining different solutions. The need for a connected and flexible set of mobility solutions sensitive to the temporal and spatial patterns of mobility needs is inevitable. Accessible and easily understandable information on routing, booking, and ticketing systems, as well as cooperation, shared values, and trust between various parties, are key success factors for sustainable rural mobility. Conclusion Integration of the needs of various user groups is essential when aiming to achieve the provision of environmentally, socially, and economically sustainable mobility solutions in rural areas. Supplementary Information The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1186/s12544-022-00536-3.
| S-EPMC8983330 | biostudies-literature
Project description:First-generation college students and those from ethnic groups such as African Americans, Latinx, Native Americans, or Indigenous Peoples in the United States are less likely to pursue STEM-related professions. How might we develop conceptual and methodological approaches to understand instructional differences between various undergraduate STEM programs that contribute to racial and social class disparities in psychological indicators of academic success such as learning orientations and engagement? Within social psychology, research has focused mainly on student-level mechanisms surrounding threat, motivation, and identity. A largely parallel literature in sociology, meanwhile, has taken a more institutional and critical approach to inequalities in STEM education, pointing to the macro level historical, cultural, and structural roots of those inequalities. In this paper, we bridge these two perspectives by focusing on critical faculty and peer instructor development as targets for inclusive STEM education. These practices, especially when deployed together, have the potential to disrupt the unseen but powerful historical forces that perpetuate STEM inequalities, while also positively affecting student-level proximate factors, especially for historically marginalized students.
| S-EPMC9197167 | biostudies-literature
Project description:The quest for information is one of the most common activity of human beings. Despite the the impressive progress of search engines, not to miss the needed piece of information could be still very tough, as well as to acquire specific competences and knowledge by shaping and following the proper learning paths. Indeed, the need to find sensible paths in information networks is one of the biggest challenges of our societies and, to effectively address it, it is important to investigate the strategies adopted by human users to cope with the cognitive bottleneck of finding their way in a growing sea of information. Here we focus on the case of Wikipedia and investigate a recently released dataset about users' click on the English Wikipedia, namely the English Wikipedia Clickstream. We perform a semantically charged analysis to uncover the general patterns followed by information seekers in the multi-dimensional space of Wikipedia topics/categories. We discover the existence of well defined strategies in which users tend to start from very general, i.e., semantically broad, pages and progressively narrow down the scope of their navigation, while keeping a growing semantic coherence. This is unlike strategies associated to tasks with predefined search goals, namely the case of the Wikispeedia game. In this case users first move from the 'particular' to the 'universal' before focusing down again to the required target. The clear picture offered here represents a very important stepping stone towards a better design of information networks and recommendation strategies, as well as the construction of radically new learning paths.
| S-EPMC5289465 | biostudies-literature
Project description: Not available
| S-EPMC11556636 | biostudies-literature
Project description:Committee reviews improve the quality of multiple-choice question (MCQ) exams; however, such review processes are typically highly resource-intensive and time-consuming. We report a review process that requires limited faculty time and administrative resources. A small committee reviewed selected items (14-20%) of the final exams of six independent block courses taken by first- and second-year medical students. This process resulted in a significant increase in the item discrimination of reviewed questions in all exams. Our findings support the utility of a review process and may offer health profession educators a more practical and efficient approach for improving the quality of in-house MCQ exams.Supplementary informationThe online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s40670-022-01631-9.
| S-EPMC9584026 | biostudies-literature
Project description:ObjectivesDeveloping a search strategy for use in a systematic review is a time-consuming process requiring construction of detailed search strings using complicated syntax, followed by iterative fine-tuning and trial-and-error testing of these strings in online biomedical search engines.MethodsBuilding upon limitations of existing online-only search builders, a user-friendly computer-based tool was created to expedite search strategy development as part of production of a systematic review.ResultsSearch Builder 1.0 is a Microsoft Excel®-based tool that automatically assembles search strategy text strings for PubMed (www.pubmed.com) and Embase (www.embase.com), based on a list of user-defined search terms and preferences. With the click of a button, Search Builder 1.0 automatically populates the syntax needed for functional search strings, and copies the string to the clipboard for pasting into Pubmed or Embase. The offline file-based interface of Search Builder 1.0 also allows for searches to be easily shared and saved for future reference.ConclusionsThis novel, user-friendly tool can save considerable time and streamline a cumbersome step in the systematic review process.
| S-EPMC4848107 | biostudies-literature
Project description:IntroductionAdolescent sexual health interventions are increasingly incorporating content that is inclusive of LGBTQIA+ youth (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer/questioning, intersex, asexual, and other marginalized sexualities and genders). Evaluations of such programs must also be inclusive to enhance the validity of evaluation results and avoid further marginalization. We present strategies for increasing LGBTQIA+-inclusivity based on our evaluation of SafeSpace, a sexual health curriculum.MethodsTo design an LGBTQIA+-inclusive program evaluation, we leveraged LGBTQIA+ research staff's insights, pursued a parental consent waiver, developed an inclusive recruitment plan, and crafted demographic and sexual behavior survey measures with input from youth and equity experts. We conducted a pilot study with 42 youth ages 14-17 to assess the feasibility and efficacy of our strategies.ResultsWe obtained a parental consent waiver and recruited a majority LGBTQIA+ pilot study sample (62%). Using themes from cognitive interviews with youth and experts regarding inclusive framing and use of plain language, we refined demographic measures and expanded sexual behavior measures.ConclusionFindings suggest that the strategies used to enhance LGBTQIA+-inclusivity in our evaluation of SafeSpace were effective in respectfully and more accurately capturing a fuller range of experiences and identities of LGBTQIA+ and cis-straight youth. The strategies and survey measures developed for this study can be applied to increase LGBTQIA+-inclusivity in other adolescent sexual health program evaluations.
| S-EPMC11000634 | biostudies-literature