Kevin Eagan

Assessment of Course-Based Undergraduate Research Experiences: A Meeting Report

This report presents a summary of a meeting on assessment of course-based undergraduate research experiences (CUREs), including an operational definition of a CURE, a summary of research on CUREs, relevant findings from studies of undergraduate research internships, and recommendations for future research on and evaluation of CUREs.

Defining Attributes and Metrics of Effective Research Mentoring Relationships

Despite evidence of mentoring’s importance in training researchers, studies to date have not yet determined which mentoring relationships have the most impact and what specific factors in those mentoring relationships contribute to key outcomes, such as the commitment to and persistence in research career paths for emerging researchers from diverse populations. Efforts to broaden participation and persistence in biomedical research careers require an understanding of why and how mentoring relationships work and their impact, not only to research training but also to promoting career advancement. This paper proposes core attributes of effective mentoring relationships, as supported by the literature and suggested by theoretical models of academic persistence. In addition, both existing and developing metrics for measuring the effectiveness of these attributes within mentoring relationships across diverse groups are presented, as well as preliminary data on these metrics from the authors’ work.

Examining Production Efficiency in Higher Education: The Utility of Stochastic Frontier Analysis

Production frontier analysis and the technical efficiency of production are conceptual tools that can provide insight into the production efficiency of colleges and universities. This chapter provides an overview of the theoretical and conceptual underpinnings of stochastic frontier analysis (SFA) and its application to degree production efficiency in higher education. The theoretical background, conceptual basis, statistical properties, and application of different types of SFA models that are used to generate measures of production efficiency are discussed. True fixed-effects (TFE), true random-effects (TRE), random parameter (RP), and latent class (LC) are among the SFA models introduced and discussed. Using cross-sectional and panel data and various models, this chapter demonstrates how SFA can be employed to examine bachelor’s degree productivity of master’s comprehensive universities. Differences in estimates of the technical efficiency of degree production across TFE, TRE, RP, and LC models of SFA, with different distributional assumptions of technical efficiency are discussed. The chapter also provides an example of the utility of a SFA model and how it is used to rank institutions based on their technical efficiency of degree production. It concludes with recommendations for future applications of SFA models in higher education.

Educating tomorrow’s reformists: factors affecting the development of undergraduates’ social progressivism

ABSTRACT Researchers have unpacked the ways in which students participate in democracy through voting and other forms of civic engagement. However, very little empirical work has delved into how students develop socially progressive values, despite their unprecedented importance to young people during their years in higher education. Rooted in a rich historical context of campus demonstration spanning the past 75 years and current events in the United States, this inspection of college students’ social progressivism was grounded by Pascarella’s model of students’ learning and cognitive development, and uses OLS (ordinary least squares) regression to investigate the phenomenon. Analyzing data collected by the Cooperative and Institutional Research Program from 159 institutions across the United States, this study explored the predictive capacity of students’ interaction with influential agents of socialization and other variables central to undergraduates’ college experiences. Results indicate that socially progressive students tended to interact more with faculty outside of office hours and had a higher cumulative GPA. Additional findings and implications are discussed.

Implementation of a Learning Assistant Program Improves Student Performance on Higher-Order Assessments

This study demonstrates that the positive effect of learning assistant (LA) implementation in a highly structured, flipped molecular biology class is not only the effect of active learning, but that students in courses with LAs perform better on exam questions requiring higher-order cognitive skills, with underrepresented minority students particularly benefiting.