Do you want to make your classroom more inclusive? Do you feel like you might need to learn more about what inequities might even exist in the classroom? The ASU Research for Inclusive STEM Education (RISE) Center is sponsoring a virtual seminar series this semester focused on inclusive STEM education! Building off of a successful seminar series last year that attracted between 200-1000 people at each talk, there will be three seminars this fall term. All of the events are free, no registration is required, and online ! Just click the zoom links below to join the Zoom webinar! For more information (or to check out past recorded seminars), visit the Society for the Advancement of Biology Education Research  (SABER) website on diversity and inclusion efforts . Upcoming Events Understanding oppression faced by Asian Americans Thursday, September 16th, 9am PT Sapna Cheryan, University of Washington Zoom link:  https://asu.zoom.us/j/85307613286 The meaning beyond the words: Ho...

Everyone is on Slack right now. Including me, as I write this blog! Oh, you aren’t? I’ll do my best to help you make the leap! What is Slack anyway, and what makes it different from, say, the AOL Chatrooms of yore? And even if it is special, how can you effectively use it in classrooms? It’s time to Level Up Immersive Conversation Using Slack! In Part 1 of this series, we talked about Yellowdig as an online social media platform that lives in your Canvas course fully equipped for online asynchronous discussion and immersion synchronous discussion. It has auto-grading capabilities and can help learners organize thoughts about the course around major themes. Its gamification features ensure learners stay on topic and contribute consistent and quality posts and replies. Slack is different from Yellowdig, but can also be used to enhance your classes. Here are some of the major features of Slack. Independent workspace , Slack is not a Canvas embedded tool. It’s an independent workspace for...

Active learning has been recommended as a more effective way to teach when compared to traditional lecturing, yet active learning can be implemented in many different ways. One common approach in active learning is to ask students to share out their thoughts either with other students or in front of the whole class. These social interactions can be fruitful for hearing different perspectives and building classroom community, but they also can present challenges because they create a larger number of opportunities for a student to feel judged based on their answers. This worry of being judged, or fear of negative evaluation, has been shown to be a problem in active learning, particularly for students with anxiety . Implementation of Active Learning In two interview studies, one with students from a research institution and a second with community college students , students reported that how active learning is implemented matters. Answering a question that is timed based on accuracy...

Although Christians are overrepresented in American society, they are underrepresented in biology careers. What is the reason for this under-representation? Prior research has indicated that Christians feel as though they don’t belong in biology , that some biology instructors make Christians feel as though they have to choose between their faith and biology, and many people incorrectly assume that one has to be an atheist to accept evolution . When biology faculty members were asked whether they would take on a graduate student who was an evangelical Christian, they were less likely to want to hire this person than someone who did not reveal an evangelical Christian identity. These studies indicate that the Christian identity may be stigmatized in the context of academic biology. Because Christianity is an identity that can be hidden or invisible, it could be considered a concealable stigmatized identity (CSI) in the biology community. Concealable Identities Concealable stigmati...

Many STEM students are seeking the opportunity to conduct undergraduate research at some point in their academic career due to its many benefits. However, finding and securing a research position can be challenging, and may be more difficult for some students than others. In a recent publication in the International Journal of STEM Education, researchers interviewed undergraduates who were involved in undergraduate research and students who were not involved but interested in participating in research in order to compare their knowledge on finding and securing research positions at a research-intensive institution ( Cooper et al., 2021 ). How can students find research? Students who were interviewed said that they found research opportunities by talking with instructors, academic advisors, peers, or teaching assistants or by using online university resources. The study found that there were no differences between students who did research and students who wanted to do research in the ...

Imagine sitting in the audience at a large conference and you had a question. You think to yourself, “should I ask it?” but then overthinking, nervousness, and anxiety come to play, forcing a larger part of your consciousness to rely on someone else to ask that question for you. This is a decision that students in your classes are experiencing, and not all students experience this to the same extent. Student participation as a way to engage students: what you should know A common way for instructors to maintain an active and engaged classroom is by allowing their students to participate in front of the class; this teaching practice is sometimes known as the “Socratic Method” and can serve as a way to help students stay engaged and to critically think ( Garside 1996 ). Instructors will often use this method because they think it can benefit everyone in their classrooms, but little research has been done in large-enrollment science courses. Is whole-class student participation equally be...

Higher education today is filled with information about inclusive practices for our classrooms and schools that need to be discussed from multiple perspectives, and do not have simple solutions. A quick Google search will lead to hundreds of education events focused on inclusion for nearly every day of the year. These webinars are informative, use highly qualified speakers, and share new ideas and perspectives. However, studies have shown that although webinars are great ways to give faculty information, they do little in terms of changing behaviors or decisions by educators in the long term. A quote from Nancy Dana, author of “The PLC Book” states “While we may have been intrigued and even inspired, the next day we would all return to the hectic pace of our classroom routines, and whatever was learned during that one “in-service” day, quickly faded from our memories.” Dana goes on to promote PLCs (Professional Learning Communities) as a way to follow up information workshops with oppo...

Early in the fall of 1992, in my first grad school course at Oklahoma State University I first heard of Stephen Krashen . His famous Theory of Second Language Acquisition posits that “acquisition requires meaningful interaction in the target language - natural communication - in which speakers are concerned not with the form of their utterances but with the messages they are conveying and understanding” (Krashen, 1992). In essence, meaningful communication is what produces any learning, not just English language learning. That fall, discussions rambled about Krashen’s notion of comprehensible input, expressed as i + 1. Simply put, this formula states that learners should always receive input (i) that is just one (1) level of difficulty above their current understanding. In theory, you cannot quantify i or 1, but we know something like i + 20 is suboptimal. In the classroom, you can open the lines of communication so students can feel safe expressing gaps in knowledge and communication...

Inclusive Teaching. The literature is clear: creating classroom spaces, virtual or in-person, where students feel like they belong is an important step to ensuring students are retained and progress to graduation. Amy Pate , Associate Director for Faculty Support within SOLS, and I ran a session recently, co-hosted by the RISE Center for Research in Inclusive STEM Education , that focused on the frameworks that educators use to evaluate whether a given course or curriculum is designed to create such inclusive spaces. The recording of that session can be found here . The session was well attended and interactive, but perhaps you were not able to attend or you are only now hearing about this topic. Below are the highlights of the ideas presented and the questions we grappled with. We need to start with some definitions Inclusive Pedagogy: A student-centered approach to teaching where instructors create an inviting and engaging learning environment for ALL students with diverse background...

The opportunity to attend a university online is an attractive option for many students because of the flexibility in scheduling, the lack of commuting, and the ability to work from wherever. This is a particularly enticing option for individuals working full-time in any capacity such as a 9-5 office job or for taking care of children or other family members. So, as universities begin to develop more of these programs, these online programs open access to college degrees for a larger slice of society. However, who is enrolling in these programs, and are there grade differences for different groups of students in online courses? We know that, on average, students from backgrounds that are historically underrepresented in STEM tend to do worse in the classroom compared to their overrepresented counterparts. This group broadly includes BLNP (Black, Latinx, Native American, and Pacific Islander) people, women, people of lower socioeconomic status, and first-generation to college students. ...