Faculty play an important role in attracting students to the geosciences, helping them to thrive in geoscience programs, and preparing them for careers. Thus, faculty have the responsibility to work toward broadening participation in the geosciences by implementing equitable and inclusive practices in their teaching and their programs. Faculty…

Distance ed and information technology (IT) have had to teamed up to boost Wi-Fi on campus and provide students with face-to-face tutoring due to COVID-19. While the relationship between IT and distance-learning staff is often necessity-driven, changes wrought by the coronavirus resulted in more of a "hand-and-glove" approach, where most…

It is argued that social legitimation is possible through hegemony whereby people of a given social system see the system as legitimate through the naturalness of a way of thinking about issues of all kinds. But, how this naturalness is articulated against a certain context is empirically under-explored. This study attempts to address this issue…

This paper will discuss why technical skills alone will not be enough for students to have successful careers in the digital age. Much of their success will hinge on critical soft skills, such as adaptability, inner strength, holistic thinking, and a collaborative spirit. Examples will be provided for inclusion with a computer science program, but…

Microplastic contamination of the environment is a major concern but detecting such contamination presents a challenge, particularly for particles <0.1 mm in size. Community scientists and students who participated in a plankton monitoring program and routinely examined samples of seawater using brightfield microscopy, often found fragments and…

At all levels of education, the racial achievement gap in performance between Black and Latino students and their White peers stubbornly persists. While the causes of this gap are numerous and interrelated, one theory posits that students from underrepresented racial groups may face stereotype threat, meaning that fear of failing and thereby…

Open Educational Resources (OER) represent a small but growing portion of the educational resources market, but the use of OER in engineering is limited. This study seeks to identify the current adoption patterns of OER in engineering mechanics courses and barriers to adoption. Research questions are examined through the lens of Rogers' Diffusion…

A survey of 2,574 students and 1,157 faculty members across ten institutions of postsecondary education in the state of Utah was conducted by the "Utah Academic Libraries Consortium." Survey items were created to understand the influence of textbook costs on student academic behavior and the viability of faculty adopting open educational…

Scientific expertise is manifested through extensive cycles of making and acting on decisions. To learn the processes and practices of science, therefore, students must have practice with scientific decision making. We argue that this can only happen if students are afforded agency: the opportunity to make decisions to pursue a goal. In this…

This paper examines the Oregon Promise, a state-level program that exclusively subsidizes in-state community college attendance. I estimate impacts using a difference-in-difference design that links students in states with essentially universal 10th-grade PSAT coverage to national-level postsecondary enrollment data. I find that the implementation…

We investigate the relationship between college openings, college attainment, and health behaviors and outcomes later in life. Though a large prior literature attempts to isolate the causal effect of education on health via instrumental variables (IV), most studies use instruments that affect schooling behavior in childhood or adolescence, i.e.…

The Hispanic-serving community colleges STEM Pipelines (HSCC-STEM) study is a research project that explores the transitions to and through Hispanic-serving two-year institutions for underrepresented minoritized STEM students. This brief uncovers the most viable HSCC STEM pathways for Latinxs and other underrepresented minoritized students as well…

The Hispanic-Serving Community Colleges STEM Pipelines (HSCC-STEM) study is a research project that explores the transitions to and through Hispanic-serving two-year institutions for underrepresented minoritized STEM students. This brief uncovers the most viable HSCC STEM pathways for Latinxs and other underrepresented minoritized students as well…

The purpose of this study is to understand the personal impact of first-generation community college students of color have after taking a psychology course. This research study focused on studying groups of people who were excluded from past research and were missing during the literature gap. This qualitative study examined the general impact…

This brief is part of a broad landscape analysis focused on policy and practice issues related to the recognition of prior learning. The landscape analysis focuses on issues arising in the practice of the recognition of prior learning, policies that encourage or limit its adoption, and key research needs and future directions for the field. This…