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Research delves into link between text anxiety and poor sleep
LAWRENCE — College students across the country struggle with a vicious cycle: Test anxiety triggers poor sleep, which in turn reduces performance on the tests that caused the anxiety in the first place. New research from the University of Kansas just published in the International Journal of Behavioral Medicine is shedding light on this biopsychosocial process that can lead to poor grades, withdrawal from classes and even students who drop out.
Author foresaw danger of Trump’s rhetoric
LAWRENCE – Given that he finished his new book on the former president’s rhetoric last summer, long before the Jan. 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, Robin Rowland seems prescient warning of the threat of authoritarianism arising from the nationalist populism of Donald Trump. Moreover, the University of Kansas professor of communication studies concludes his book “The Rhetoric of Donald Trump: Nationalist Populism and American Democracy” with a warning that a more skillful politician might put Trump’s rhetorical formula to an even more effective — and deadly to democracy — end.
‘DeepRacer’ competition sharpens programming, coding skills
LAWRENCE — Computer science students at the University of Kansas will test their skills throughout the remainder of the semester with a series of races using self-driving model cars developed by Amazon Web Services. The students in Andrew Williams’ Introduction to Artificial Intelligence class have spent the semester programming their cars and virtually testing the results using AWS’ DeepRacer, a cloud-based 3D racing simulator. For the races underway throughout the remainder of the spring semester, though, students have built a real track in the atrium of the School of Engineering’s LEEP2 building and are testing their AI programs using 1/18th-scale race cars.
Kristin Bowman-James named among American Academy of Arts & Sciences 2021 class
LAWRENCE — A chemist is the most recent University of Kansas faculty member to be named to the American Academy of Arts & Sciences. Kristin Bowman-James, University Distinguished Professor of Chemistry and director of Kansas NSF EPSCoR, is among the more than 250 individuals elected to the academy in 2021. The newly elected members will sign the Book of Members, which includes the signatures of Martin Luther King Jr., Margaret Mead, Alexander Hamilton and Benjamin Franklin.
KU history scholar selected as 2021 Andrew Carnegie Fellow
LAWRENCE — University of Kansas scholar Beth Bailey was named today as one of 26 researchers in the 2021 class of Andrew Carnegie Fellows. With a $200,000 stipend, it is one of the most generous awards of its kind for scholarship in the humanities and social sciences. Bailey, a Foundation Distinguished Professor in the Department of History and the founding director of the Center for Military, War, and Society Studies, is a leading historian of the modern United States whose research interests include the U.S. Army in the modern United States and the history of gender and sexuality in 20th century America.
Full stories below.
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Contact: Brendan Lynch, KU News Service, 785-864-8855, [email protected], @BrendanMLynch
Research delves into link between text anxiety and poor sleep
LAWRENCE — College students across the country struggle with a vicious cycle: Test anxiety triggers poor sleep, which in turn reduces performance on the tests that caused the anxiety in the first place.
New research from the University of Kansas just published in the International Journal of Behavioral Medicine is shedding light on this biopsychosocial process that can lead to poor grades, withdrawal from classes and even students who drop out. Indeed, about 40% of freshman don’t return to their universities for a second year in the United States.
“We were interested in finding out what predicted students’ performance in statistics classes — stats classes are usually the most dreaded undergrad class,” said lead author Nancy Hamilton, professor of psychology at KU. “It can be a particular problem that can be a sticking point for a lot of students. I’m interested in sleep, and sleep and anxiety are related. So, we wanted to find out what the relationship was between sleep, anxiety and test performance to find the correlation and how it unfolds over time.”
Hamilton and graduate student co-authors Ronald Freche and Ian Carroll and undergraduates Yichi Zhang and Gabriella Zeller surveyed the sleep quality, anxiety levels and test scores for 167 students enrolled in a statistics class at KU. Participants completed an electronic battery of measures and filled out Sleep Mood Study Diaries during the mornings in the days before a statistics exam. Instructors confirmed exam scores. The study showed “sleep and anxiety feed one another” and can hurt academic performance predictably.
“We looked at test anxiety to determine whether that did predict who passed, and it was a predictor,” Hamilton said. “It was a predictor even after controlling for students’ past performance and increased the likelihood of students failing in class. When you look at students who are especially anxious, it was almost a five-point difference in their score over students who had average levels of anxiety. This is not small potatoes. It’s the difference between a C-minus abd a D. It’s the difference between a B-plus and an A-minus. It’s real.”
Beyond falling grades, a student’s overall health could suffer when test anxiety and poor sleep reinforce each other.
“Studies have shown students tend to cope with anxiety through health behaviors,” Hamilton said. “Students may use more caffeine to combat sleep problems associated with anxiety, and caffeine can actually enhance sleep problems, specifically if you’re using caffeine in the afternoon or in the evening. Students sometimes self-medicate for anxiety by using alcohol or other sedating drugs. Those are things that we know are related.”
Hamilton said universities could do more to communicate to students the prevalence of test anxiety and provide them with resources.
“What would be really helpful for a university to do is to talk about testing anxiety and to talk about the fact that it’s very common and that there are things that can be done for students who have test anxiety,” she said. “A university can also talk to instructors about doing things that they can do to help minimize the effect of testing anxiety.”
According to Hamilton, instructors are hindered by the phenomenon as well: Anxiety and associated sleep problems actually distort instructors’ ability to measure student knowledge in a given subject.
“As an instructor, my goal when I’m writing a test is to assess how much a student understands,” she said. “So having a psychological or an emotional problem gets in the way of that. It actually impedes my ability to effectively assess learning. It’s noise. It’s unrelated to what they understand and what they know. So, I think it behooves all of us to see if we can figure out ways to help students minimize the effects of anxiety on their performance.”
The KU researcher said testing itself isn’t the problem and suggested an increase in regular tests might reduce anxiety through regular exposure. However, she said a few small changes to how tests are administered also could calm student anxiety.
“In classes that use performance-based measures like math or statistics, classes that tend to really induce a lot of anxiety for some students, encouraging those students to take five minutes right before an exam to physically write about what they’re anxious about can help — that’s cheap, that’s easy,” Hamilton said. “Also, eliminating a time limit on a test can help. There’s just really nothing to be gained by telling students, ‘You have an hour to complete a test and what you don’t get done you just don’t get done.’ That’s really not assessing what a student can do — it’s only assessing what a student can do quickly.”
Hamilton said going forward she’d like research into the link between test anxiety and poor sleep broadened to include a more diverse group of students and also to include its influence on remote learning.
“The students in this study were mostly middle-class, Caucasian students,” she said. “So, I hesitate to say these results would generalize necessarily to universities that have a more heterogeneous student body. I also would hesitate to say how this would generalize into our current Zoom environment. I don’t know how that shakes out because the demands of doing exams online are likely to be very different.”
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Author foresaw danger of Trump’s rhetoric
LAWRENCE – Given that he finished his new book on the former president’s rhetoric last summer, long before the Jan. 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, Robin Rowland seems prescient warning of the threat of authoritarianism arising from the nationalist populism of Donald Trump.
Rowland also correctly predicted that, in the short term, at least, American institutions would not permit an anti-democratic putsch, even as he now allows that the events of Jan. 6 came closer to doing so than he expected.
In the longer term, the University of Kansas professor of communication studies warns of the danger of creeping authoritarianism. With recent efforts to limit voting rights and strip power from officials who stood firm in following the law, he fears this prediction, too, is beginning to be realized.
Moreover, Rowland concludes his book “The Rhetoric of Donald Trump: Nationalist Populism and American Democracy” (University of Kansas Press, 2021) with a warning that a more skillful politician might put Trump’s rhetorical formula to an even more effective — and deadly to democracy — end.
Rowland is the type of old-school student of American political — and particularly presidential — rhetoric who recognizes the rhetorical, even oratorical, power of both Ronald Reagan and Barack Obama, calling them “once in a generation” communicators, a la Martin Luther King Jr. and Franklin Roosevelt before them. He has published widely about the 40th and 44th presidents.
As opposed to the uplifting “shining city on a hill” and “audacity of hope” tropes that he believes contribute to common national purpose, Rowland takes a dim view of Trump’s tweets, speeches, rallies and appeals to authoritarian personality structure, calling it “disturbing.”
“There are two variants of populism,” Rowland said. “Progressive populism is largely policy-oriented, and it focuses on real villains who have prospered when the rest of us haven’t. Nationalist populism creates an emotional reaction. It isn’t a rational solution to the problem. In many cases, there is no problem. Antifa was not rioting. In the last 40 years, there is exactly one far-left murder, and there are hundreds by white supremacists. There were not dangerous caravans of immigrants. Undocumented immigrants, on average, commit fewer crimes than native-born Americans.
“Almost none of what Trump said was true, but he was a master at creating fear and hatred of others.
“He drew on a sense of grievance against the elite and presented himself as the hero who would resolve all these problems by force of will. You often see this in nationalist far-right populist movements, where you have the outsider or the businessman who is himself rich — and the leaders of nationalist movements are almost always male — so he is a perfect manifestation of that.
“And then his style: the odd punctuation, the absence of any kind of normal syntax, the lack of organization, the bragging, the swearing. All of that proved his authenticity to his supporters. He wasn’t like one of those smooth-talking others,” Rowland said.
Rowland’s book resolves a puzzle about the loyalty of Trump supporters to their hero through gaffes and scandals, two impeachment inquiries and what has been labeled by his own medical advisers a disastrous pandemic response. That loyalty even survived Republicans losing the House, Senate and presidency. Yet, in recent weeks Republican leaders, including House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, have journeyed to Mar-a-Lago to seek forgiveness from Trump for comments that were insufficiently reverential toward him.
According to Rowland, “Trump’s hold on his supporters is emotional, rather than ideological or policy-based. That emotional bond is tied to the way his rhetoric creates hate, draws on grievance and then resolves those strong emotions by offering himself as the strongman protector of his supporters.”
“This obviously demonstrates enormous dysfunction in American politics. I mean, virtually everything he said was false.”
Despite Trump’s electoral defeat, the danger of nationalist populism has not faded, Rowland said.
“Trump demonstrated the power of this, but not necessarily its maximum power,” the author said. “If you had someone with genuine accomplishment … could an Elon Musk or (Oklahoma Sen.) Tom Cotton be more effective with this message? Yes, I think they could.”
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Contact: Cody Howard, School of Engineering, 785-864-2936, [email protected], @kuengineering
‘DeepRacer’ competition sharpens programming, coding skills
LAWRENCE — Computer science students at the University of Kansas will test their skills throughout the remainder of the semester with a series of races using self-driving model cars developed by Amazon Web Services.
The students in Andrew Williams’ Introduction to Artificial Intelligence class have spent the semester programming their cars and virtually testing the results using AWS’ DeepRacer, a cloud-based 3D racing simulator. For the races underway throughout the remainder of the spring semester, though, students have built a real track in the atrium of the School of Engineering’s LEEP2 building and are testing their AI programs using 1/18th-scale race cars.
“It’s a method for us to teach deep reinforcement learning — an artificial intelligence technique that allows cars to learn to drive by themselves, using their video cameras and other sensors they have,” said Williams, the KU Engineering associate dean for diversity, equity and inclusion and the Charles E. and Mary Jane Spahr Professor in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.
“It’s going to be pretty exciting,” said Amanda Nelson, a junior in computer science from La Cygne.
In artificial intelligence, “reinforcement learning” uses reward functions — essentially, points for achieving a task — to help a machine to learn. In the case of the DeepRacer cars, students deploy code, then the car receives points for staying on the track or for completing a lap quickly. The car responds to those points and adjusts its behavior accordingly.
“I’ve seen my car drive off the track a thousand times at this point,” Nelson said. “But as the car learns, it will get better and better.”
There will be two tiers for the KU DeepRacer competition. The first event, held April 14, pitted four-person student teams against each other. Later in the semester, the students will compete individually in a series of socially distanced races, with a champion to be crowned during the final class of the semester.
KU students aren’t just racing against each other. Using the 3D simulator, programmers from around the world compete in AWS’ monthly DeepRacer time trials. The top 10% of finishers in those races can advance to the company’s “Pro Division,” where qualifiers have an opportunity to compete for the AWS DeepRacer League Championship Cup, a live event that will be held in Las Vegas in December.
“Every single person on my team has qualified for the pro division,” Nelson said.
Williams said the DeepRacer program is giving students hands-on experience they can use when they enter the job market.
“It’s interesting, different and fun, so I think they’re more engaged,” he said. “The other thing I look at — you have companies like Tesla, Google and Amazon working on cars and trucks that can drive by themselves. This is real practical experience they can put on their resumes.”
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Kristin Bowman-James named among American Academy of Arts & Sciences 2021 class
LAWRENCE — A chemist is the most recent University of Kansas faculty member to be named to the American Academy of Arts & Sciences.
Kristin Bowman-James, University Distinguished Professor of Chemistry and director of Kansas NSF EPSCoR, is among the more than 250 individuals elected to the academy in 2021. The newly elected members will sign the Book of Members, which includes the signatures of Martin Luther King Jr., Margaret Mead, Alexander Hamilton and Benjamin Franklin, among others.
“It is an incredible honor to be elected to the American Academy of Arts & Sciences,” Bowman-James said. “To be in the company of so many great intellects is mind-boggling. I have had a particular fondness for Ben Franklin, one of the founders, whose scientific exploits catalyzed my interest in pursuing a career as a scientist when I was just 7.”
Bowman-James joined KU’s chemistry department in 1975 after earning a bachelor’s degree and doctorate from Temple University and a postdoctoral research fellowship at The Ohio State University.
Her research involves the strategic design of organized molecular frameworks as selective receptors for anions, as well as potential ligands for transition metal ions — work with the potential to meet challenges like nuclear waste site cleanup and depletion of the world’s available phosphorus reserves.
Through the Kansas National Science Foundation’s Established Program to Stimulate Competitive Research (NSF EPSCoR), which Bowman-James directs, she helped bring as much as $20 million over five years in federal research funds to Kansas through NSF’s Research Infrastructure Improvement (RII) awards.
The program’s current RII Track 1 (primary) award seeks to determine how microbiomes from aquatic, plant and soil systems can help address agricultural challenges, enhance crop productivity and aid in conserving native and agricultural grasslands.
Bowman-James’ recognition as a scholar includes numerous awards, most recently the American Chemical Society Award in Inorganic Chemistry. She is a fellow of the American Chemical Society.
In the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, Bowman-James joins KU’s class of 2018 members Robert Warrior, Hall Distinguished Professor of American Literature & Culture, and Jorge Soberón, University Distinguished Professor of Ecology & Evolutionary Biology and director of KU’s Biodiversity Institute and Natural History Museum. Other KU-affiliated academy members include W. Keith Percival, professor emeritus of linguistics, and Donald Worster, distinguished professor emeritus of history.
“This is a tremendous and well-deserved honor for Dr. Bowman-James,” said John Colombo, interim dean of the College of Arts & Sciences. “I’ve had the great pleasure of working with her over the years in my positions with the Office of Research and the College. Her work represents a great example of basic research with clear and meaningful relevance to real-world impacts. She has always been a role model for researchers and scholars here at KU, and I’m pleased to offer my congratulations on this achievement.”
Founded in 1780, the academy honors exceptional scholars, leaders, artists and innovators and engages them in sharing knowledge and addressing challenges facing the world.
The 2021 class includes media entrepreneur and philanthropist Oprah Winfrey; playwright, screenwriter and actor Suzan-Lori Parks; and neurosurgeon and medical correspondent Sanjay Gupta.
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KU history researcher selected as 2021 Andrew Carnegie Fellow
LAWRENCE — University of Kansas scholar Beth Bailey was named today as one of 26 researchers in the 2021 class of Andrew Carnegie Fellows. With a $200,000 stipend, it is one of the most generous awards of its kind for scholarship in the humanities and social sciences. Honorees include established and emerging scholars, journalists, authors and public intellectuals.
Bailey, a Foundation Distinguished Professor in the Department of History and the founding director of the Center for Military, War, and Society Studies, is a leading historian of the modern United States whose research interests include the U.S. Army in the modern United States and the history of gender and sexuality in 20th century America.
“We congratulate Dr. Bailey on this achievement. Given the recent attacks on U.S. democracy, historians have never been more important in our society than they are now. Beth’s work on the relation between the U.S. military and American society and on the history of gender and sexuality represent important areas of inquiry in today’s world. She has been a prolific and productive scholar, and this achievement is well-deserved,” said John Colombo, interim dean of the College of Liberal Arts & Sciences.
Bailey will use the funding to complete a book on the U.S. Army and “the problem of race” in the Vietnam era. The project examines U.S. Army efforts to address calls for racial justice and to manage the racial conflict that exploded during the late 1960s and early 1970s. The army’s actions, she argues, must be understood in the context of its “institutional logic” — the collective force of the Army’s culture, history and tradition, its structure and organization, its avowed mission and purpose, its policies and practices. As part of the project, she will also host a symposium at the Center for Military, War, and Society Studies on the role of the U.S. military in social change.
“I’m truly honored to receive this fellowship and pleased that it helps draw attention to the significant research being done here at KU,” Bailey said. “And, as a historian, I also want to stress the contemporary relevance of my work, which the Carnegie Foundation funded under the category ‘Strengthening Democracy.’ Today institutions across the nation — including KU — are facing renewed calls for racial justice. And many of these institutions are trying, with varying levels of commitment, to change. I’m arguing that institutions matter in struggles for social change. I’m arguing that change has to be incorporated into the major institutions of national life in order to make a long-term, fundamental difference, and so we need to understand the roles that institutions play in that process.”
Bailey’s research seeks to understand how social change is brought about in the United States, who “belongs” in the nation and on what terms. Her research has been supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars and the American Council of Learned Societies, and she has twice received the Army Historical Foundation Distinguished Writing Award. She was elected to the Society of American Historians in 2017.
She earned her bachelor’s degree in American culture from Northwestern University and holds a master’s degree and doctorate in American history from the University of Chicago. Having previously worked at KU as a visiting professor in the 1980s, she joined the university faculty in 2015, along with her husband, David Farber, the Roy A. Roberts Distinguished Professor in the Department of History.
Bailey’s books include “America’s Army: Making the All-Volunteer Force”; “Sex in the Heartland,” which explores the sexual revolution in Lawrence; “The First Strange Place: Race and Sex in World War II Hawai’I,” co-written with David Farber; the forthcoming work “From Front Porch to Back Seat: Courtship in Twentieth Century America,” as well as the co-edited volumes “Managing Sex in the U.S. Military”; “Beyond Pearl Harbor: A Pacific History”; “Understanding the US Wars in Iraq and Afghanistan”; “America in the Seventies” and “The Columbia Guide to America in the 1960s.” She also serves as managing author of the widely assigned textbook “A People and a Nation: and co-edits the Cambridge University Press series on Military, War, and Society in Modern U.S. History.
She has given talks or been a visiting scholar in Australia, China, France, Germany, Indonesia, Japan, Lebanon, the Netherlands, Russia, Saudi Arabia and the United Kingdom. She formerly chaired the OAH International Committee and served as coordinator for the Organization of American Historians (OAH)/American History Research Association of China residency program. She has served on the Department of the Army Historical Advisory Subcommittee, to which she was appointed by the Secretary of the Army, and she currently serves on the Society for Military History Board of Trustees and the Society of American Historians Executive Committee.
Bailey is the fourth KU researcher to receive a Carnegie Fellowship. Greg Cushman, associate professor of history and environmental studies, was one of the inaugural Carnegie Fellows in 2015. Cecilia Menjivar was named a Carnegie Fellow in 2017, when she was a Foundation Distinguished Professor of Sociology at KU. Sarah Deer, a University Distinguished Professor who holds a joint appointment with the School of Public Affairs & Administration and the Department of Women, Gender & Sexuality studies, joined the 2020 class of Carnegie Fellows.
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