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KU engineering department wins $100,000 grant to work on a new model for evaluating teaching
LAWRENCE – The Department of Chemical & Petroleum Engineering at the University of Kansas has been selected to receive a $100,000 award from the Association of American Universities to support projects that lead to better methods for evaluating STEM teaching. KU is one of only five AAU member departments to receive the award. “If we want excellent teaching, we need an evaluation system that recognizes the intellectual work that goes into helping our students learn. We are excited to be part of a process that has the potential to help STEM departments around the country,” said Susan Williams, Charles E. & Mary Jane Spahr Professor and department chair, who will lead the project.
Black Instagram users’ propensity for political posts among study’s findings
LAWRENCE – In a time when Americans have largely retreated to their own political corners on social media, it’s hardly surprising that they tend to share more political content on platforms where they believe they are among the like-minded. But one finding in a new study of U.S. social media habits surprised a pair of University of Kansas researchers: Black Instagram users tend to share more political content on the platform than non-Black users, despite many not knowing whether most of their IG followers share their beliefs. “What Will They Think If I Post This? Risks and Returns for Political Expression Across Platforms” was published in the journal Social Media + Society
LAWRENCE — Scholars and experts in law will focus on post-pandemic privacy implications concerning the disparities in the health system, technology and cybersecurity for an upcoming University of Kansas event. The 2022 Kansas Journal of Law & Public Policy Symposium “Post-Pandemic Privacy: Health, Data, and Dignity” will run from 9 a.m. to 1:30 p.m. Friday, Feb. 11. The online event is free and open to the public, but registration is required. Register and learn more about the program online.
Full stories below.
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Contact: Evan Riggs, Office of the Provost, 785-864-1085, [email protected], @KUProvost
KU engineering department wins $100,000 grant to work on a new model for evaluating teaching
LAWRENCE – The Department of Chemical & Petroleum Engineering at the University of Kansas has been selected to receive a $100,000 award from the Association of American Universities to support projects that lead to better methods for evaluating STEM teaching.
KU is one of only five AAU member departments to receive the award.
Susan Williams, Charles E. & Mary Jane Spahr Professor and department chair, will lead the project. She will work with Prajna Dhar, professor of chemical & petroleum engineering, and Andrea Follmer Greenhoot, director of the Center for Teaching Excellence and a professor of psychology. Dhar and Greenhoot will be co-leaders of the effort, which will involve all faculty in C&PE.
The approach being developed will provide a more holistic assessment of the quality of faculty teaching, one that integrates information provided by multiple perspectives.
“This is critically important work that is often overlooked,” Williams said. “If we want excellent teaching, we need an evaluation system that recognizes the intellectual work that goes into helping our students learn. We are excited to be part of a process that has the potential to help STEM departments around the country.”
C&PE faculty members Kyle Camarda, Karen Nordheden, Alan Allgeier, Russell Ostermann and Jennifer Robinson round out the project team members.
Universities have long relied on student surveys to evaluate teaching, but a growing body of research has pointed to many weaknesses in that approach. The student voice is important, but it provides only one perspective on an instructor’s teaching. Without a broader evaluation system, many instructors have also been reluctant to adopt teaching practices that lead to deeper learning and greater success for students. That approach, known as evidence-based teaching, also helps close gaps between majority and minority groups.
“Evaluation of evidence-based teaching practices ensure better and more equitable learning experiences for students,” Dhar said. “Working with partners at AAU also gives KU further opportunities to showcase and disseminate this work widely.”
The model builds on the KU department’s work in an initiative to improve teaching evaluation, known as Benchmarks for Teaching Effectiveness, led by Follmer Greenhoot and Doug Ward, associate director at the KU teaching center and associate professor of journalism & mass communications. The Benchmarks initiative is part of a collaborative project known as TEval, which received a $2.8 million grant from the National Science Foundation to improve teaching evaluation. It involves the University of Massachusetts, Amherst; the University of Colorado, Boulder; and Michigan State University.
The chemical & petroleum engineering department’s approach involves creating “peer triads,” teams of three or four faculty members who share teaching strategies and provide each other feedback across the year. Williams and Dhar were instrumental in helping the Center for Teaching Excellence develop the peer triad approach when they were faculty fellows there. In C&PE’s model, the triads will produce evidence that can be used for the evaluation of individual instructors’ teaching. They will also promote broader curriculum discussions among faculty, helping ensure that courses in the program allow students to gain crucial skills over time.
This AAU award enables C&PE to implement its approaches at scale and to evaluate the success of the program. Project leaders hope to explore whether different evaluators can reliably and fairly apply evaluation standards, whether the system is feasible and sustainable, and whether it diminishes bias in the evaluation process.
“We have learned an enormous amount about how to evaluate teaching effectiveness through our work in Benchmarks and TEval,” Follmer Greenhoot said. “One of the most exciting aspects of Chemical and Petroleum Engineering’s approach is that it is also designed to encourage faculty to be innovative in their instruction. The award will help the department continue to make strides in developing a fairer and more equitable approach to teaching evaluations, one that also supports better teaching and student learning.”
The teaching evaluation demonstration projects are part of the AAU Undergraduate STEM Education Initiative, which was established in 2011. That initiative has worked to influence the culture of STEM departments at research universities by encouraging faculty members to use teaching practices proven to maximize student engagement and support student learning. The demonstration projects are funded through a $570,000 gift to AAU from the Sarah Gilbert & Carl Wieman Charitable Fund.
Other awards in the program will go to the departments of Engineering Sciences at Dartmouth College; Chemistry at Michigan State University; Biology at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill; and Chemistry at the University of Southern California.
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Contact: Rick Hellman, KU News Service, 785-864-8852, [email protected], @RickHellman
Black Instagram users’ propensity for political posts among study’s findings
LAWRENCE – In a time when Americans have largely retreated to their own political corners on social media, it’s hardly surprising that they tend to share more political content on platforms where they believe they are among the like-minded.
But one finding in a new study of U.S. social media habits surprised a pair of University of Kansas researchers: Black Instagram users tend to share more political content on the platform than non-Black users, despite many not knowing whether most of their IG followers share their beliefs.
Titled “What Will They Think If I Post This? Risks and Returns for Political Expression Across Platforms” and published Nov. 12 in the journal Social Media + Society, the research was co-written by Cameron Piercy, KU assistant professor of communication studies, and Elnaz Parviz, doctoral candidate in communication studies. They expanded upon a paper Parviz wrote for Piercy’s Network Analysis class, examining nationally representative data collected by the nonpartisan Pew Research Center during the summer of 2016, as voters prepared for the U.S. presidential election.
“The driving question was, ‘How do the people in your social media network affect what you’re willing to post online?’” Piercy said. “And homophily is a prominent feature of networks, where we find people connect with like-minded others in pretty much any context. You always have to worry about homophily in network research. And, surprisingly, there are some studies out there that say that those with social media heterophily — having different-minded others in your network — are actually more likely to post political stuff. We thought, ‘That doesn’t seem logical.’ And so we tried to chase it down with this Pew dataset.”
Piercy said he and Parviz found that “half of participants had changed their privacy settings, and if you had done that, you felt more empowered to speak your voice about politics. Further, regardless of platform, if users saw online discussion as less civil than face-to-face, they were less likely to post about politics.”
Their analysis showed that almost everyone has a guess about their Facebook friends’ political beliefs. That is less true of Twitter users and even less true of Instagram users.
“On Facebook, 6% of people don’t know the political leanings of their friends,” Piercy said. “On Twitter, 26.9% say they don’t know, so about one-fourth. But on Instagram, almost half say that they don’t know the political leanings of their friends.”
Perhaps, Piercy speculated, users are unsure about the political leanings of their connections on Instagram because of the photo-centric nature of the platform, as compared to other major social media. But that doesn’t explain why Black Instagram users who comprehend their connections’ political leanings are so much more willing to share political posts on the platform.
“I think it’s undeniable that something is going on here,” Piercy said. “The effect is too big, relative to all the other effects that we see in our study. It really is the case that Black Americans are more likely to engage in political expression on Instagram. I feel confident about that.”
Black Facebook and Twitter users act no differently in this realm than their white peers on those platforms, Piercy said of the findings. Nor do other ethnic groups, with the exception of white users on Facebook, who engaged in slightly less political expression on the platform.
“Political expression” may not necessarily be Democrat-versus-Republican stuff, Piercy said of the study. Such posts might be issue-oriented, such as a post advocating the #BlackLivesMatter movement.
Piercy said that, to a certain extent, he and Parviz were able to answer the “what” question from the Pew data. They wrote that more research is needed into the “why.”
“I think there’s a logic to it, based on the affordances of the various social media,” Piercy said. “What you can do is different on Facebook than it is on Twitter or than it is on Instagram. So if we start with that assumption, then what people are doing on Instagram and the way that they share is different, and the way that Black people share about political matters is different. The why and how of that— someone should dig into that, for sure, and compare the content that’s posted by white Americans, Black Americans, Hispanic Americans.”
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Contact: Sydney Halas, School of Law, 785-864-2338, [email protected], @kulawschool
LAWRENCE — Scholars and experts in law will focus on post-pandemic privacy implications concerning the disparities in the health system, technology and cybersecurity for an upcoming University of Kansas event.
The 2022 Kansas Journal of Law & Public Policy Symposium “Post-Pandemic Privacy: Health, Data, and Dignity” will run from 9 a.m. to 1:30 p.m. Friday, Feb. 11. The online event is free and open to the public, but registration is required. Register and learn more about the program online.
The event is co-hosted by the journal and PrivacyPraxis. Najarian Peters, associate professor of law, founded the PrivacyPraxis conference and hosted its inaugural conference in February 2021.
“We are very excited for this year’s symposium on post-pandemic privacy implications concerning health care, technology and cybersecurity,” said Melinda Foshat, symposium editor and third-year law student. “We wanted to discuss these topics with several privacy, health care and technology law experts who could formulate solutions to important privacy and security concerns raised during the COVID-19 pandemic.”
The virtual symposium will start with a keynote presentation by Kimberly Mutcherson, co-dean and professor of law at Rutgers Law School in Camden. Mutcherson’s scholarship focuses on reproductive justice, bioethics, and family and health law.
Following the keynote, speakers will discuss post-pandemic privacy implications concerning health care, technology and cybersecurity during two panels and a roundtable discussion. The first panel’s focus is on the post-pandemic reshaping of the health care system and issues regarding telehealth, technology and social disparities. The second panel’s focus is on post-pandemic technology concerns regarding security, surveillance, biometric and location data, and other technology-related privacy implications. During a roundtable discussion, panelists will discuss the disproportionate impact of the pandemic in racially marginalized communities.
Keynote Presentation:
- Kimberly Mutcherson, “Reproductive Justice in a Post-Pandemic World: Lessons We Should Learn (But Probably Won’t)”
Co-dean and professor of law, Rutgers Law School in Camden
Panel One Presentations:
- Renée Landers, “Protecting Privacy While Providing Health Care, Promoting Public Health, and Enhancing Economic Security”
Professor of law and faculty director of the Health and Biomedical Law Concentration and the Masters of Law: Life Sciences program, Suffolk University Law School
- Soumitra Bhuyan, TBA
Assistant professor, Edward J. Bloustein School of Planning and Public Policy, Rutgers University
- Jody Madeira, “Post-Pandemic Privacy and the Ethics of Telehealth Platforms and Third Party Apps”
Professor of law and Louis F. Niezer Faculty Fellow, co-director, Center for Law, Society & Culture, Maurer School of Law, Indiana University, Bloomington
- Leah Fowler, “COVID-19 & The Myth of Health Data Privacy”
Research assistant professor and research director in the Health Law & Policy Institute, University of Houston Law Center
- Barry Furrow, “Mainstreaming Telehealth? Constraints on Broad Use”
Director of the Health Law Program and professor of law, Thomas R. Kline School of Law, Drexel University
Panel Two Presentations:
- Jacob Elberg, “Balancing Telehealth Availability with Fraud and Abuse Concerns”
Associate professor of law and associate director of the Center for Health & Pharmaceutical Law, Seton Hall Law School
- Sam Halabi, “New Global Health Surveillance Technologies and the Protection of Community and Patient Privacy”
Senior scholar and visiting professor, O’Neill Institute for National and Global Health Law, Georgetown University Law Center
- David Opderbeck,“Contact Tracing, Vaccination Status, and Privacy: The EU Example”
Professor of law and co-director of the Gibbons Institute of Law, Science & Technology, Seton Hall Law School
Roundtable Discussion:
- Teri Dobbins Baxter
Williford Gragg Distinguished Professor, the University of Tennessee College of Law
- Thomas Williams
Clinical professor of law and director of the JD/MA in Bioethics and Science Policy, Duke Law School
Scholarship associated with the program will be published in a future issue of the Kansas Journal of Law & Public Policy.
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