Provide Clarity with Single-Point Rubrics

How much time do you spend putting together rubrics for assignments? If you're like most instructors, a thoughtful, well-made rubric requires substantial investment, and includes information unlikely to help students (is it useful for students know the criteria for a "0" on any assignment?). What if you could provide students with all of the relevant information for success on an assignment that a traditional rubric imparts without having to painstakingly describe each point? The single-point rubric does just that. It includes a description of the standards for mastering the content, and also allows you  to give detailed feedback on both where students exceed and fall below expectations.

Concerns (Areas that need work)	Criteria (Standards of performance)	Advanced (Areas that exceeded expectations)
	Criteria #1 Description of evidence of mastery of material
	Criteria #2 Description of evidence of mastery of material
	Criteria #3 Description of evidence of mastery of material
	Criteria #4 Description of evidence of mastery of material

Gonzalez, J. (2014, October 09). [Single point rubric]. Retrieved February 15, 2017, from http://www.brilliant-insane.com/2014/10/single-point-rubric.html

The single point rubric gives students a clear target for mastery of material, with all of the information regarding low performance stripped away. This type of rubric allows for clarity in establishing standards as well as flexibility in grading. The downside is lack of specificity in assessment. It's great for grading, but not so good at reliably assessing students, relative to a more analytic rubric.

An additional caveat is the type of grading this rubric addresses. Single point rubrics lend themselves to a no-grades system in the classroom and are typically used to encourage student reflection and self-guided mastery of material, not a traditional "A" to "F" grading scale. Also, using this kind of rubric may require more writing when grading an assignment than a traditional rubric but, again, allows flexibility in addressing areas in which students need to improve.


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How Well Do You Know Your Class Workloads?

Photo by Steve Corey

For many professors, it is difficult to gauge how much time their students spend on assigned tasks outside of class. How long does it take a student to read 30 pages from a textbook? Two scientific journal articles? How long would it take a student to write a 5-page, double-spaced article summary? With these difficulties in mind, two professors from Rice University have developed the Course Workload Estimator. This tool allows an instructor to enter the specifics of assignments given to students and to determine the estimated weekly workload.

We gave the estimator a try using an old syllabus from a 3-credit College Algebra course. The class had 4 exams (one of which was cumulative), approximately 20 pages of assigned reading from a textbook per week, and 50 other assignments (25 online homework assignments and 25 online quizzes). Entering this information yielded an estimated workload of 10.1 hours per week, slightly more than 3 hours of study per hour spent in class.

Although it varies by professor, most faculty members try to give students 3 to 5 hours of outside classwork per hour of class. For example, if a student is taking 12 credit hours, she would need to study somewhere between 36 and 60 hours per week in order to keep up.

Unfortunately, there is a substantial gap between teacher expectations and actual student behavior. According to the most recent National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE) data, UNF students report studying between 1 and 1.5 hours per credit hour weekly. Thus, the student taking 12 credit hours, would only study 12 to 18 hours per week, instead of the expected 36 to 60 hours.

Recent research has shown, however, that time spent studying is not, in and of itself, a reliable predictor of academic performance in college (Nonis & Hudson, 2006; Plant, Ericsson, Hill, & Asberg, 2004). Rather, time spent studying interacts with other factors, including ability, motivation, and the quality of studying environment, to predict academic performance. The Course Workload Estimator could be a good starting point for translating your class content into clear time-commitment expectations for your students, but more studying does not necessarily mean higher performance. It seems that course workload is no substitute for good course design and planning.

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The Shared Benefits of a College Degree

Publicly-funded education has long been considered integral to the health of our country. In 1822, James Madison noted, “learned Institutions ought to be favorite objects with every free people. They throw that light over the public mind which is the best security against crafty & dangerous encroachments on the public liberty.” He goes on to advocate for public funding of education as a path towards equal opportunity, noting “Without such Institutions, the more costly of which can scarcely be provided by individual means, none but the few whose wealth enables them to support their sons abroad can give them the fullest education… At cheaper & nearer seats of Learning parents with slender incomes may place their sons in a course of education putting them on a level with the sons of the Richest.”

How has public funding for Florida colleges fared in the past decade? According to a recent study by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, state funding has been cut 22.7% since 2008, a reduction of $2,132 per student (a glimmer of hope is that since 2015, Florida has increased funding 3.5%, or $244 per student). As a result of public finding cuts, institutions have been forced to raise tuition costs. Indeed, Florida’s universities increased tuition costs by an average of 64.3% between 2008 and 2016, a hike of $2,490 per student. Florida is not unique in this, and these data point to a worrying national trend in higher education: less state funding and more reliance on students to carry the load of the cost of college education – many by taking on substantial student loan debt.

In a recent article in the Chronicle of Higher Education, Philip Trostel argues that making cuts to higher education is easier when law-makers emphasize private, individual benefits of a college education (e.g., higher annual and lifetime income, longer life expectancy, more access to higher-quality healthcare, higher retirement accounts). When the value of higher education is framed on these individual benefits, law-makers and citizens alike often exclude discussions of the larger societal goods that result from higher education. Trostel argues that the notion of an educated populace as a public good has been completely omitted. With that omission, and the prevailing notion that private goods are best served by private means, financing of higher education has been deemed better-served by the free market, and not by public funding of universities.

Making higher education out of reach for those, as Madison suggests, with "slender incomes" has the consequence of inadvertently diminishing the "public mind" and threatening "public liberty." Shifting the narrative of the benefits of college education away from private gains to public gains might not change much in the short term. Over time, focusing on the shared social goods a society receives from college graduates can bring wider support for more public funding to achieve those aims, supporting a public that is ready to defend their public liberties.

By Greg Rousis

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How Can Profs Keep Students' Attention? Put Them in Charge

It's important for faculty to work their hardest to ensure their courses, especially when they are long or comprised of tedious or difficult subject matter, hold their students' attention and keep them engaged. Because it can be so easy for students to drift mentally in class (research purports that college students retain only 10% of material covered in lecture-based courses), it is critical that faculty employ new and creative ways to hold engagement high and get students involved and thinking critically.

Raymond Benton, Jr., a professor at Loyola University Chicago, has managed to put a new spin on an active-learning classic. In what is known as a "jigsaw classroom", students are divided into subgroups within the class, with each subgroup learning a specific topic that they then teach to the rest of the class. Each subgroup member becomes an expert in their allotted area, and the subgroups must educate each other in order to complete an overarching assignment that all groups must complete as a class.

In Benton's version, the "jigsaw classroom" puts students in control of more than learning and communicating information in a given course topic. In an example he provides, a small class of students are given three assigned readings, all of which teach student must read before class, and are randomly assigned to a reading group and a discussion group. In each reading group, the students discuss one of the three articles thoroughly, comparing their own conclusions and understandings of the article. They become experts in that one article, knowing that the other group members will ask questions about that article they will be responsible for answering. Next, they discuss what they did not fully understand about the other two articles and form a list of questions for the other groups. The students then move to discussion groups, in which article "experts" are represented equally, and ask and answer questions and engage in conversations about the articles. Students then reconvene in their original reading groups to compare the answers they received from other groups and share how they answered questions about their group's article. Finally, the professor regroups the entire class to have a class discussion debriefing what they learned about all the articles.

This method is rich with opportunities for active critical thinking and deep levels of processing that will allow students not only to pay attention, but also to engage with the course material in ways they would not remotely approach in a traditional lecture.

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Alternatives To Traditional Final Exams Encourage Student Engagement, Learning

When students leave college classrooms at the end of the semester, what are they really taking away with them? Too often, courses culminate in a student turning in a traditional multiple-choice final exam, quietly muttering "Thank you" to the professor, and walking out of the lecture hall having learned little of substance that will stay with them for more than a couple months. The suggestion to exchange final exams for semester 'finales' may seem far-fetched, but the idea might have practical value.

The most common reason students walk out of a course without having learned meaningfully is that they never made course material relevant to themselves. Past research indicates that students experience greater levels of motivation to learn when their teachers make content personally relevant to the students. Personalizing knowledge by putting it into one's own context is all that it takes for students to understand more deeply, rather than just hearing information, memorizing it, and regurgitating it without having ever really thought about it.

There are plenty of examples as to what a semester "finale" might look like. In general, they all focus on giving students an ultimate experience they can use to make course material personal and practical for them- something they can take with them into their future. The idea is to get students thinking,especially on the last day, so they can leave the course still mulling over what they've learned and how it can continue to apply to their intellectual life. Presenting students with just one particularly novel, perplexing question, for example, and asking them to solve it within a confined time is one way to change the final assessment paradigm. Perhaps instead of a final exam, the last day of the course could be a rubric-outlined debate or a collaborative assignment.

The point is, there is a serious lack of genuineness and creativity in the way most professors assess their students at the end of their courses. Final exams as they stand now often make the end of the semester feel more like a chore than a crescendo of an academic experience. By adding a little novelty, a little intrigue, and a little excitement, professors can create an end of the semester assessment that students will be talking about, and thinking about, long after the course is finished.

How do you add creativity and engagement in your final exams?


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Use Technology To Help Curate Your Tenure Portfolio

Tenure-track faculty are asked to keep track of their most important contributions from the very moment they are hired. That body of work, sometime in the future, will be used to determine their worthiness for receiving tenure, and must be managed diligently in the meantime. Over what can be a very long period, one of the biggest challenges of creating an excellent portfolio to showcase one's entire career up to that point is simply keeping track of everything. That's where technology can be a game-changer.

Robert Talbert, a mathematics professor at Grand Valley State University and contributing writer for the Chronicle of Higher Education blog, says that technology can help faculty preparing for tenure selection work smarter, not harder. Instead of relying wholly on traditional storage and hoping that, on submission day, everything is in the binder that's been accumulating important files for years, he suggests using some technological assistance to keep disciplined and organized. At the core of his advice is that you can use technology to implement a system you trust that can easily be categorized and searched that you are able to easily organize and settle on a weekly basis. This allows you to make sure you are staying ahead of the constant influx of materials you must track, such that you can rest easy knowing each item that came across your desk or screen is safely vaulted where you can access it easily at a later time if necessary. Talbert recommends using converting all paper documents into electronic formats using a scanner, then keeping track of them using a free storage and organization service like Evernote, Dropbox, a combination of both, or some other means. Talbert goes into pretty specific detail about how he recommends using Evernote and Dropbox to prepare a portfolio. But the basic takeaway is this: if you're preparing for tenure selection, get organized with technology or be risk being overwhelmed when your time comes.

UNF will be hosting two two vendor demonstrations for electronic tenure and promotion portfolios on Friday, March 11th: Interfolio’s By Committee (12:00-1:30pm) and Data180’s Faculty180 (2:00-3:30pm). Both demonstrations will be held in Building 51, room 1205. Faculty are encouraged to come out, ask questions, and provide feedback on these digital systems for managing the promotion and tenure documents and process.

Math Motivation Moderates the Effect of Math Anxiety on Math Performance

Mathematics is perhaps the most-feared school subject across education, from students in elementary schools to universities. There is a wealth of research providing evidence that math performance and math learning have negative relationships with math anxiety. Unfortunately, the more anxious one becomes about their math performance, the worse they will be at learning and performing math skills.

Math anxiety contributes to a performance gap in STEM fields for minority students and women, who report more anxiety in math-related fields than their White male counterparts. But is it really as simple as, "If math makes you nervous, you won't be as good at it"? Recent research indicates that that's not the whole story.

A 2015 study, researchers, brings some new evidence to the discussion. The authors underscore that, yes, past research has shown that math anxiety diminishes math cognition, stunting both math performance and learning. However, anxiety tends to have a curvilinear relationship with complex cognitive tasks in general, such that more anxiety correlates with increased performance, but after a certain point, increased anxiety begins to correlate with decreased performance. When this relationship is graphed it is shaped like an upside-down U (similar to a parabola, as a matter of fact).

What researchers found was that math anxiety and math performance had a curvilinear (inverse-U) relationship, but only when the students had a high intrinsic math motivation. Those with low math motivation showed the typical negative linear relationship between math anxiety and performance, that is, as anxiety increased, performance decreased. The moderating effect of motivation on the relationship between math anxiety and performance was found for both children and adult college students.

This research demonstrates that there is a a complex interaction of emotional and cognitive factors that impact learning and performance. For math, it seems, anxiety can be harnessed as a useful learning tool for those with high intrinsic motivation. Those with low intrinsic motivation around math are best to avoid panic.

Using Rubrics Adds Depth to Analytical Learning

In recent years, higher education has moved in a utilitarian direction, refocusing on the purported purpose of post-secondary education- preparing its students to live and work after graduation.

Many faculty have begun to show a preference of active learning, a strategy that fosters critical and analytical thinking about material and its application. Recently, support has risen for utilizing rubrics as a way to support effective teaching. Rubrics, scholars suggest, have many uses in university classrooms to stimulate active learning by increasing the quality and quantity of student performance.

Rubrics bring clarity and order to assignments that are more subjective and require more abstract thought than multiple-choice or fill-in-the-blank style questions. However, the benefits of using rubrics can go much further than that. Rubrics help to ensure quality by providing criteria for what different levels of manipulation and understanding of material are worth in terms of grading. Best of all, because students have a means to assess their work as they are completing it, they engage in the critical thinking required for self-evaluation.

Rubrics can be used in creative ways to boost energy in the classroom and enable students to view material from novel standpoints. For instance, a rubric might be used as a means for students to think like their professor if they are asked to write a rubric for their own assignment or use a rubric to grade their own work or those of their peers. When students create rubrics or grade using a rubric, they are applying course knowledge in a more complex and applied way than a typical assignment may require. Classroom practices that include rubrics hold great potential in stimulating deeper levels of thought and engagement with material by forcing students to think analytically and critically.

New Education School Promotes Teacher Competency, But Questions Remain

The American public school system has long struggled to recruit and retain high-performing teachers, particularly in schools in lower income areas where there are less resources to go around yet more obstacles to learning to overcome. Another issue that needs improvement is that there there are not enough "high-performing" school teachers to begin with.

Critics believe that this is due to the lack of competency-based graduate level teacher education schools. As more and more teachers have some type of specialized graduate degree in education, with about 185,000 Master's in Education degrees awarded in 2010, issues with graduate education degrees have become more apparent. One planned school, created by outspoken teacher-education critic Arthur Levine, seeks to focus on critical competencies achieved rather than the amount of time spent in class learning how to teach.

The principal of establishing competency for educators may hold just as much value for those who teach in higher education as it does for those who teach in primary and secondary settings. Many faculty members at universities are in teaching positions because they are experts in their fields, but they are rarely required to demonstrate teaching competencies or educational standards. One group, , has proposed a competency-based system or teachers in higher education, including badges for mastering learning environments, assessment techniques, ethics, and leadership.
Digital Promise

Several problems with the school's proposed approach have yet to be reckoned with. First, the criteria for these competencies is nebulous, with no goals or practices specifically enumerated by the new school. Which competencies are critical, and what they are composed of, must be clearly delineated for both secondary and post-secondary educators.

Second, what is the best way to measure how good or competent a teacher is? Surely it has something to do with a unique ability to bring out the best in their students and to enable them to learn what they will need to succeed. However, although there are outcomes that reflect effective teaching, there is no set of accurate or quantifiable measurements to determine what effective or competent teaching is or how it is achieved. These issues are just as relevant for school-teachers as they are for higher education faculty.

Third, and perhaps most importantly, the proposed school is an entirely online curriculum. This format gives freedom to future teachers to work at their own pace to achieve the competencies and skills deemed necessary to graduate, but it seems unlikely that an online learning curriculum with no social interaction between teachers and no experiences with students will prepare graduates for an extremely person-focused profession. Results remain to be seen.


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3 Strategies for Making The Most of the Few Minutes Before Class Starts

Most professors arrive to class early, perhaps around five minutes before they will need to begin teaching. Typically, professors will use this time to collect thoughts, prepare technology, or organize slides and notes. Faculty who are newest to teaching may especially use this time to prepare themselves for lecturing, which can initially be intimidating. But once the jitters have gone and the course material has become second-nature, how can professors use that few minutes before class begins to maximize student learning? In a recent article, James Lang provides some suggestions on how best to use that time.

Get to know your students. In the book, How College Works, sociology researchers conclude that relationships formed in college are the most important and influential part of the undergraduate experience. This includes relationships formed with professors, which are key to motivating students and increasing their learning and performance. Learning is easier when students can relate to their professors and know that professors care about their academic success. Using the first minutes of class to simply ask one or two students how they are, what their major is, or what they enjoy outside of class is an effective way to open the door to a mentoring relationship or at least increase their trust and participation.

Provide context. Use the extra pre-class minutes to help students understand the greater framework for the course or its attached field of study by writing an agenda or schedule for the day's material. This gives students an awareness of how course information fits in the day's lecture, the overall subject, and the course's sub-groupings and allows them to make connections between specific facts and ideas. This leads students to a more practical understanding of course knowledge rather than strings of facts to passively memorize and regurgitate.

Engage the class. Giving your students a reason to focus up and learn is a great way to use the minutes before class when students are still trickling in and getting settled. Displaying a picture, quote, or idea that relates to the course in an especially interesting way fosters interest and enthusiasm. Other engaging ways to warm up your students include sharing a funny image, story, or jokes. Personally, I ask students to request a song the class to be played in the following class, pick my favorite request, and play it in the 3-5 minutes as students are coming in. Such efforts not only help to enliven the class by bringing them some entertainment and break the ice, but also help to humanize their professor.

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Student Evaluations of Teaching Useful - in Context

Students' evaluations of professors have great value for administrators who seek an accurate
assessment of the quality of teaching at their universities. This is in turn drives their decisions regarding faculty promotion, pay rates, and termination.

One of the problems with placing such heavy weight on student evaluations in making decisions about faculty employment is that students don't always give valid feedback. Students, like most people, don't always play fair. Students will sometimes give poor scores (not to mention rude comments) in evaluations, not because the scores are warranted, but because they felt the class was too challenging or made them work too hard. When these ratings are included in aggregate, they punish professors who simply teach difficult courses or demand high standards from their students.

How can student evaluations be more useful? A recent article outlines some suggestions on using student evaluations of teaching more effectively. The best ideas seem to revolve around cross-checking teaching quality using measurements other than student evaluations alone. For instance, finding innovative ways to assess how much students are learning by the end of their courses, rather than asking them to solely self-report how much they liked the experience of the course, is one way to supplement assessment. Other ideas that have been successfully implemented include classroom observations (both scheduled and surprise) by administrators or senior faculty, spot-checking faculty practices feedback on assignments, and including multiple iterations of student evaluations throughout the semester to give professors a chance to adjust their strategies. The Office of Faculty Enhancement at UNF provides a number of alternatives to end-of-semester student evaluations.

Context is very important in using results from student evaluations, especially because research has shown positive correlations between students' expected grades and their evaluation scores. Essentially, student evaluations are important because they provide direct feedback on how students feel about their professors' ability to educate them. However, they do not tell the whole story, must be taken in their rightful context, and need accompaniment to be used as a key metric in faculty assessment.

Is Your Grading Biased? Beware the Halo Effect

Humans are prone to taking mental short cuts, it's part of the physiology of our brains. We are exposed to so much information throughout our lives and from day-to-day that it is necessary for our brain to utilize mental short-cuts (i.e., heuristics) to help sort information and to determine what should grab one's attention. Heuristics are mental guidelines you create from your experience to help you reach an answer more quickly than by algorithm searching through every possible answer. The only problem is that this quick thinking can also bias cognition and decision-making, and grading is no exception.

The Halo effect is one form of heuristic bias that impacts everyone's decision making. It happens when we find good qualities in an individual and, through experience, incorporate those good qualities as part of our perception of the person. This biases the way we perceive their actions, whether good or bad. For instance, attractive individuals are often perceived to be more intelligent, talented, and generally good more often than individuals of average attractiveness.

The Halo effect can produce biases in grading just like any other area of judgment. In a previous post we discussed briefly how faculty will frequently grade students based on their personal characteristics and past performance rather than solely on their performance on the work in question. Faculty may begin reading an assignment, stop and think, 'so-and-so usually does great work' and allow that judgment to alter the way they grade the assignment.

This bias in judgment and decision-making process is exactly what researchers found at work in a study examining the Halo effect in subjective student assessments. The researchers randomly assigned faculty to observe a student perform either very poorly or very well on an oral presentation, and then graded the student on a written assignment. When grading the exact same student on the exact same writing assignment, faculty members gave substantially higher grades when the students had done well in a presentation before being graded and lower grades when the students had done poorly before being graded. Other than giving either a poor or good oral performance, the student was the same and the quality of the written assignment was the same. And yet the grades were different. Prior experience with students will bias the way faculty members grade students on future assessments, but by being aware of this "Halo effect", faculty can more effectively protect against bias. Making student assessments anonymous is another effective was to reduce biased grading.

Making Office Hours Required for Students: The Best Bad Idea You've Ever Heard

It is well known that students who build working relationships with their professors are
more successful both in college and after graduation. One of the best ways to cultivate that relationship is the simple step of coming to a professor's office hours.

Despite the fact that office hours are theoretically beneficial for students, very few students seem to take advantage of this valuable opportunity. Office hours should be the time students are receiving much-needed mentoring that can lead to increased student engagement, leading to better performance in the course and ultimately to higher graduation rates.

Should faculty then make office hours mandatory for students? The logic behind this move is simple. Much is lost in the translation of course material and knowledge from the professor to the student during the lecture because it lacks personal and motivational factors that are typical in more personal conversations. This effect is compounded when grades and feedback are given only through writing, whether digital or analog. Making a personal connection has always been, and is still, extremely helpful to the learning process. Although practical ways to implement required office hours depend tremendously on course size, the idea that students benefit from engaging with their professors on an individual level about course topics is wholly unsurprising and is worth pursuing.

Let us know your feedback. Do you require office visits for your students? What would be some advantages or disadvantages?

TurnItIn Provides a Valuable Service, But Jeopardizes Students' Rights

Realistically, if you're a professor who needs to ensure students aren't cheating on their papers, TurnItIn.com is a true time-saver with few alternatives. TurnItIn is a tremendous boon for professors who simply do not have time to painstakingly check their students' written work for plagiarism against the millions of other scholastic documents on the internet. In an insightful article published last month, one professor praises TurnItIn for its incredible efficiency and criticizes it for its monopolistic hold on students' original works.

The issue hinges on what TurnItIn does with all of those student papers it receives. It keeps them, archives them, and continues to use them for plagiarism checking. Whereas this is more of an issue in principle rather than reality, the fact remains that students are required to give over their intellectual products to a company that will use them to make a profit. Some may find that to be a bit unsettling, although there is no apparent harm that comes from it. After a 2007 lawsuit, a district court determined that TurnItIn is not breaking any copyright laws in their practices. Despite the fact that it is not technically unlawful, TurnItIn does influence the rights of students to be in control of their intellectual property.

As term papers, research manuscripts, and other long written assignments pile up, it is hard to argue against the benefits of using a site like TurnItIn to protect academic integrity and ensure the quality of students' educations. But there is a hidden cost of student ownership that, although practically innocuous (for now), may trouble the ethical constitutions of some.

For Ph.D.s Working Outside Academia, Incorporation Holds Benefits

Occupational prospects for Ph.D. holding scientists and researchers have become increasingly sparse in recent years. In 2012 around 10% of scientists with a Ph.D. were unemployed. For many highly-educated individuals who have been unable to find careers as a university faculty, working as a freelance researcher, consultant, grant writer, or scientific worker outside of academia has been the best available option. Regardless of employment status, Ph.D.s may stand to benefit by incorporating themselves into a limited liability company.

According to Andrew Thaler, Ph.D., incorporation provides a more efficient way to manage finances and make services more appealing to outside sources of work/funding. As a "single-owner S Corp limited liability company (LLC)", for instance, personal wealth is better protected from lawsuits. In addition, there are a number of tax benefits afforded to a LLC that are not available to an individual person. Perhaps more importantly, forming a corporate organization allows a given Ph.D. to be more competitive for research grants and other opportunities for which they may otherwise be overlooked. Funding organizations are less hesitant to pay large amounts in the form of a grant or other vector to a professional consulting organization than they are to an individual. Organizations or corporations appear to be more accountable and therefore less risky in terms of investment. Additionally, the perception of being the leader of an organization, rather than a lone, semi-unemployed freelancer, is more appealing to those who can offer opportunities to further your career.

Incorporating can serve to legitimize the functions and services that are likely to produce greater opportunity for career growth and success. Futures look positive for more Ph.D.s to seek incorporation regardless of their current employment status.

When Assessing and Correcting Personal Bias, Slow and Steady Wins

The first step in eliminating bias is acknowledging that a bias exist. However, few faculty members, or any other profession, are willing to acknowledge their own biases in the classroom. Although progress can come from large-scale change that trickles down into individual lives and everyday interaction, equally beneficial change can work from the bottom-up. Taking small steps on a manageable time scale to reduce our own biases can make all the difference.

Here are a few tips to becoming a little more equitable everyday.
1) Faculty are often tempted to grade students based on personal characteristics and their work, rather than solely on the quality of the work. Like many other mental shortcuts used for judgement and decision-making, making assumptions about another person saves massive amounts of time and are often accurate enough. Faculty may begin reading an assignment, stop and think, "So-and-so usually does great work," and, thus, skim the rest of the assignment with their mind already made up on what type of grade to give. However, when it comes to grading, using our first impression of a person is genuinely unfair. Students benefit when faculty take the time to thoroughly assess work for the work itself.

2) Whereas a faculty member may not be consciously biased, every human is biased on an unconscious level. If you don't believe that, follow this link and take the Race Implicit Attitude Test (IAT), Age IAT, or other available IAT. It's likely that you have no desire to act on your biases, whether unconscious or conscious, and simply becoming aware that you may be accidentally adjusting student performance evaluations or classroom experiences allows you to correct for biases.

3) Follow-up with yourself to continually evaluate how you are working to reduce your own bias.

4) Listen actively and empathetically to each individual with whom you speak. This allows you to look past surface-level characteristics and focus on content, substance, and quality.

5) Seek progress, not perfection. In other words, don't expect to ever fully eliminate bias, whether that's based on gender, race, age, or education level, because it is impossible to do so. But it's worth attempting to reduce as much as possible. By doing so, you are making a more fair and inclusive environment for your students.

Advancing Gender Equity in STEM Fields

Although great strides in gender equity have been made in recent years, STEM fields are among the areas where women still lag behind men. STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) has long been a boy's-club of sorts. The nature of these STEM fields in no way deters female participation by definition; women should be no less effective in these areas than men. However, STEM is intimidating for women because relatively few women are present in STEM fields. To close the gap, it would take a strong push to successfully initiate more women into these fields. A recent publication of the American Association of Colleges and Universities' Peer Review offers insight into this issue and how women can become more prominent in STEM. 

Mentoring: One Way to Remedy Disadvantages Experienced by Minority Faculty

A recent interview has shed light on how being a part of a minority group can negatively impact faculty and what can be done about it. While assistance for minority students is discussed often in university settings, it is often assumed that faculty are on an equal playing field regardless of race, which is sometimes simply untrue.

Professor Olympia Duhart, J.D. (pictured) is the President of the Society of American Law Teachers and had several important points regarding the current state of minority faculty in large university environments. Minority faculty seem to benefit more than non-minority faculty from mentoring and guidance from other, more established faculty members, regardless of the race of their mentor. Mentorship helps to decrease the isolation and pressure to be more qualified than their non-minority peers that minority faculty often feel, by offering support, guidance, camaraderie, and validation. This relationship, as well as other forms of faculty community, can serve as a buffer to the negative effects of subtle, institutional racism and other forms of prejudice and help all faculty members thrive in their academic community.

The Commission on Diversity and Inclusion at UNF has established a mentoring network for minority faculty called "Noodles and Networking." Check out the list of upcoming events.

Exam Cramming Common, But Ineffective

Photo: D. Sharon Pruitt 

When it comes to undergraduates' plans for preparing for exams,
the strategy is often to ignore the "problem" of studying until the test is imminent. Students then study as much as possible in the span of one or two days to "learn" the material in time for the exam. The problem with this practice, called cramming, is that it does not work very well. This is especially true for students who are inconsistent with class attendance, as they really are left to learn all the covered material in the day or two prior to assessment.

Compared to the strategy of incremental learning, where students study recently covered material in a smaller amount every night or several times a week, cramming simply does not produce preferable short-term nor long-term results. The larger differences between incremental learning and cramming are found in performance is in long-term retention. When students cram, they are not adequately elaborating on the material they want to learn. Rather, they are only doing what is necessary to keep the material fresh in their minds for a short time. Once they have finished their exam, that information is no longer elaborated on with any additional repetition and, thus, disappears from memory fairly quickly. Incremental learning is done with more manageable amounts of information  across many repetitions, and on a much larger time scale, allowing for elaboration and consolidation that makes information much more likely to be assimilated into long-term memory.

Students will always be drawn to cramming, as it often get results that are "good enough." Students may benefit from instructors encouraging students to abandon cramming so that the students remember material from their course after final exams are turned in.

Frankly Friday Event - Gender Gap in Promotion and Tenure

Is there a gender gap in gaining tenure?
Friday, October 9th, 2015

9:30 a.m. - 10:30 a.m.

Faculty Lounge, Building 16, Room 4201
RSVP ofe@unf.edu

The Promotion and Tenure process at UNF is designed in a way to reduce bias and provide a fair chance for any qualified professor to receive tenure. A recent Stanford University study on the promotion and tenure process revealed that, given comparable research productivity, women assistant professors were in some cases 50% less likely to receive positive tenure decisions than their male counterparts. At UNF, the differences are much smaller, with 90% of men and 88% of women receiving tenure. As part of a recent Campus Climate survey at UNF, when faculty and staff were asked whether there were discriminatory practices involved in the promotion and tenure process, 18% indicated some bias whereas 82% indicated no bias.

We invite you to join the discussion. How should UNF address concerns over the gender gap in the P&T process?
OFE will provide the coffee and pastries.

Frankly Friday: Is there a gender gap in gaining tenure?Friday, October 9th, 2015

9:30 a.m. - 10:30 a.m.

Faculty Lounge, Building 16, Room 4201
RSVP ofe@unf.edu