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University of Kansas ranked as No. 5 best school in the country for veterans
LAWRENCE — For the second year in a row, the University of Kansas ranks fifth nationally among Tier 1 research institutions in the 2022-23 “Military Friendly Schools” survey. The annual survey is the longest-running review of college and university investments in serving military-affiliated students. Institutions earning the Military Friendly School designation were evaluated using public data sources and survey information. More than 1,800 schools participated in the 2022-2023 survey, with 665 schools earning special awards for going above the standard.
KU alumnus pledges $1 million to support father’s legacy in School of Pharmacy
LAWRENCE — Family and the University of Kansas hold special places in physician and KU alumnus Jeff Lindenbaum’s heart. His late father, Siegfried Lindenbaum, was a faculty member in the School of Pharmacy for more than 20 years. Jeff Lindenbaum also met his wife, Joan Sorenson, while they attended KU. Those strong ties led Lindenbaum and Sorenson, of Billings, Montana, to make a gift commitment of $1 million to expand the Siegfried Lindenbaum Memorial Scholarship, which supports graduate students in the Department of Pharmaceutical Chemistry at KU’s School of Pharmacy.
Study shows creativity assessments progressing slowly, including racialized, gendered approaches
LAWRENCE — Creativity has been designated a critical 21st Century Skill by the National Research Council, yet there is not one ideal, accepted way to identify creative young people and encourage the strength as part of their education. A new study from the University of Kansas looks at the three primary methods of assessing creativity in young people. Those methods have pros and cons, including racialized, gendered and class-based approaches.
Full stories below.
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Contact: April Blackmon Strange, Lt. Gen. William K. Jones Military-Affiliated Student Center, 785-864-6715, [email protected], @KUvets
University of Kansas ranked as No. 5 best school in the country for veterans
LAWRENCE — For the second year in a row, the University of Kansas ranks fifth nationally among Tier 1 research institutions in the 2022-23 “Military Friendly Schools” survey.
The annual survey is the longest-running review of college and university investments in serving military-affiliated students. Institutions earning the Military Friendly School designation were evaluated using public data sources and survey information. More than 1,800 schools participated in the 2022-2023 survey, with 665 schools earning special awards for going above the standard.
KU has ranked as a Military Friendly Top 10 school since 2018 and has earned “Gold” award status since 2017.
“We are honored to be consistently recognized as a top-10 Military Friendly School. This award reflects the university’s enduring commitment to our more than 1,500 veterans, service members, spouses, dependents and ROTC students,” said April Blackmon Strange, director of the Lt. Gen. William K. Jones Military-Affiliated Student Center. “We continually strive to create an environment that’s welcoming, inclusive and supportive of all our military-affiliated students as they move to, through and beyond the university.”
Methodology, criteria and weightings were determined by Viqtory with input from the Military Friendly Advisory Council of independent leaders in the higher education and military recruitment community. Final ratings were determined by combining the institution’s survey scores with the assessment of the institution’s ability to meet thresholds for student retention, graduation, job placement, loan repayment, persistence (degree advancement or transfer), and loan default rates for all students and, specifically, for student veterans.
The rankings are available online and will be published in G.I. Jobs magazine’s May and October issues.
The Military-Affiliated Student Center at KU – a nearly 3,000-square-foot center in Summerfield Hall – serves as a centralized resource for students. It includes a lounge with 24-7 access, study spaces, headquarters for the KU Student Veterans of America student organization, VA work-study opportunities, GI Bill and military tuition assistance and more.
The university is one of just 104 campuses nationwide to have the Department of Veterans Affairs VetSuccess on Campus program with a dedicated VA vocational rehabilitation counselor. KU also has a partnership with a Kansas Commission on Veterans Affairs representative to assist with VA claims – a once on-campus service currently available remotely due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
In addition to the center, KU has several scholarships and an emergency fund for military-affiliated students, a Veterans Upward Bound program and a series of Graduate Military Programs. KU is one of more than 50 universities to have all branches of ROTC and one of eight universities designated as a Department of Defense Language Training Center, which educates hundreds of service members in strategic languages and regional area studies.
The KU Edwards Campus has a Veterans and Student Leadership Lounge. Additional KU academic programs and certificates are available in Leavenworth for military and civilians at nearby Fort Leavenworth. KU also has a 4,000-member Veterans Alumni Network.
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Contact: Michelle Strickland, KU Endowment, 785-832-7363, [email protected]; Michelle Keller, KU Endowment, 785-832-7336, [email protected]; @KUEndowment
KU alumnus pledges $1 million to support father’s legacy in School of Pharmacy
LAWRENCE — Family and the University of Kansas hold special places in physician and KU alumnus Jeff Lindenbaum’s heart.
His late father, Siegfried Lindenbaum, was a faculty member in the School of Pharmacy for more than 20 years. Jeff Lindenbaum met his wife, Joan Sorenson, when they were basketball-loving undergraduates at KU.
Those strong ties led Lindenbaum and Sorenson, of Billings, Montana, to make a gift commitment of $1 million to expand the Siegfried Lindenbaum Memorial Scholarship, which supports graduate students in the Department of Pharmaceutical Chemistry at KU’s School of Pharmacy.
“I can’t think of anything more important than to provide for the education of those people who are going to be taking care of us and defining society in the future,” Lindenbaum said. “And it would have been important to my father, too.”
Siegfried Lindenbaum was an orphan and a war refugee. His parents made the heartbreaking decision to send him and his younger brother to England as part of the organized Kindertransport effort that rescued children from Nazi-controlled countries in the months leading up to World War II. The brothers were the only members of the immediate family to survive.
An aunt and uncle eventually brought him and his brother to their chicken farm in New Jersey. He was studious and attended Rutgers University for his undergraduate and graduate degrees, then went to work for the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee. In 1970, he was offered a teaching position at KU, which he held until his death in 1993.
Jeff Lindenbaum said his father, who experienced trauma and displacement in his childhood, never felt like he belonged anywhere. But he did feel a connection to Kansas.
“Kansas was a big part of his life, and that’s part of why the decision to make this gift was easy for me, because it was part of my life, too,” he said. “Dad was passionate about research and teaching, and this gift honors both of those passions.”
Both Jeff Lindenbaum and Joan Sorenson credit their success at prestigious East Coast medical schools to their undergraduate educations at KU. He is a radiologist, and his wife is a pediatrician.
“KU gave me incredible teachers and experiences and helped launch me into medical school and residency. And I was on equal footing with everyone else who went to a private school,” Lindenbaum said. “My wife and I both got our start at KU, and it gave us the foundation we needed to succeed.”
That success has meant they are able to make a gift commitment using their retirement account. Lindenbaum made KU Endowment a beneficiary of his IRA, which allows him and his wife to leave a legacy to KU while maintaining their own resources during their lifetimes.
Ronald Ragan, dean of the KU School of Pharmacy, said the pledge provides the opportunity that many students need to get through graduate school and go out to make a difference in the health of Kansas, the nation and the world.
“I’m so pleased that Dr. Lindenbaum and Dr. Sorenson understand how important it is to support our graduate students. Planned gifts like theirs make a life-changing difference,” Ragan said. “We’re grateful for their forethought and generosity and hope it will inspire others to consider a planned gift of their own.”
Lindenbaum emphasized the importance of pharmaceutical chemistry, especially in the time of COVID-19, and he found it satisfying to support students in the field.
“To know that we, in some small way, are helping enable students from all over the world to come and do their work without worrying about where their next meal will come from or how they’re going to make that tuition payment — that’s really important, and I feel pretty good about that.”
Waleed Elballa, a graduate student in pharmaceutical chemistry and a native of Sudan, is a recipient of the Lindenbaum Scholarship. Financial issues are among the biggest challenges for international students, he said, and he is grateful to the Lindenbaum family for the support.
“The Lindenbaum Scholarship has shown me that I am appreciated not only as a graduate student but as an international student, and that has pushed me to work harder toward my goals,” Elballa said. “And it relieved me from worrying about how to pay for classes and allowed me to focus on my research.”
Siegfried Lindenbaum’s widow, Loraine, an active member of KU’s Endacott Society until her death in 2019, developed connections with many of the scholarship recipients. Her hospitality and interest in their work helped to provide a sense of belonging, particularly for those international students who were far from home.
Lindenbaum knows his gift will help KU maintain its level of excellence as well as help smart students who might have faced disadvantages or adversity, much like his father.
“I’m pleased to be leaving something that will be meaningful even if nobody remembers me or my dad,” Lindenbaum said. “It’s good to know that some of the money that I’ve been successful in accumulating is going to go to something good in the future.”
KU Endowment is the independent, nonprofit organization serving as the official fundraising and fund-management organization for KU. Founded in 1891, KU Endowment was the first foundation of its kind at a U.S. public university.
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Contact: Mike Krings, KU News Service, 785-864-8860, [email protected], @MikeKrings
Study shows creativity assessments progressing slowly, including racialized, gendered approaches
LAWRENCE — Creativity has been designated a critical 21st Century Skill by the National Research Council, yet there is not one ideal, accepted way to identify creative young people and encourage the strength as part of their education. A new study from the University of Kansas found that while creativity’s value has long been recognized, there are just three primary methods of assessing it in young people. Those methods have pros and cons, including racialized, gendered and class-based approaches.
KU researchers analyzed studies published in eight major creativity, psychological and educational journals between 2010 and 2021 to get a better picture of the state of creativity assessments. The results showed that creativity continues to be primarily assessed by divergent thinking or creativity tests, self-report questionnaires, product-based subjective techniques and rating scales. That lack of innovation in assessments shows a refined approach is needed to build creative profiles of students, better understand how creativity develops through the span of education and encourage it in multiple domains of schooling, according to the researchers.
“There are a lot of conversations about how much improvement that creativity research in education needs. We want to promote creativity with schools and students through assessments that can be applied in classrooms. We also want to reform the current high-stakes, narrowly focused standardized tests in education — maybe by using creativity assessments as an alternative,” said Haiying Long, associate professor of educational psychology and lead author of the study. “But before we are able to achieve these purposes, we want to have a better idea of the state of creativity assessments in education over the last decade and understand what has been done and what needs to be done.”
The study, written with co-authors Barbara Kerr, Williamson Family Distinguished Professor of Counseling Psychology, and Trina Emler and Max Birdnow, doctoral students in educational leadership & policy studies, all at KU, was published in the journal Review of Research in Education.
The analysis also showed that research on assessments in creativity tends to be evenly split between educational and psychological assessments. Those in education tend to focus on college more than K-12 education, while the psychological studies depend overwhelmingly on psychology undergraduates as research subjects. That is potentially problematic, the authors wrote, as those students overwhelmingly tend to be white and female, meaning they do not present a broader picture on how the assessments interact with diverse populations.
The studies are also increasingly international. That trend is encouraging, but the United States continues to lead the field. Because of that, students in many countries receive no creative assessments, while others take assessments developed in the U.S. that often do not directly translate to other languages and cultures, Long said.
Creativity assessments fall into three major approaches, the most common of which is creative or divergent thinking tests. While the tests have shown to be reliable and valid in assessing students’ divergent thinking ability, they often are not tested for all potential domains and tend to focus only on intelligence or focused primarily on one aspect such as cognitive, emotional or conative aspects of creativity, according to the researchers. That problem existed to varying degrees across self-report questionnaires and product-based assessments as well. The analysis found that there are new approaches to assessing creativity appearing, but most research continues to focus on the dominant approaches of the last several decades.
“All of these approaches have been used in the field for a long time,” Long said. “There are new tests or scales focusing on other aspects of creativity, such as creative potential, creative self-efficacy, creativity in different domains, but the review shows just how much the field is not changing. If you don’t want to change the field, it is hard to improve it.”
Perhaps most troubling, the studies on creativity assessment are primarily conducted with white students in the United States and often lack information on racial or ethnic compositions of students in international studies. That prevents further understanding of who is and is not assessed and whether there are any equity issues, the authors wrote. Also, the effect of gender socialization on creativity of girls in K-12 education has rarely been addressed, and issues of privilege and socioeconomic inequities — such as which students at underprivileged schools are assessed — are rarely explored.
The authors close the study with several recommendations to address the shortcomings of creativity assessments in education. Ideally, all students would be screened for cognitive, personality and motivational characteristics by kindergarten to establish baselines for creative approaches with reassessments at key stages. Using multiple approaches to identify and encourage students to use creativity across domains and use of assessments outside the traditionally dominant approaches would better serve students as well, they wrote. However, the researchers acknowledge challenges in the way of that goal, including better translating research from the lab to teachers who need assessments in classrooms. To address that, the authors also called for a close collaboration between creativity researchers and educators in schools by using a service model and providing teachers with more professional development on creativity.
Long praised her colleagues in KU’s creativity research group, including her co-authors as well as notable KU scholars Yong Zhao and Neal Kingston, who are working on innovative ways to assess creativity and ask deeper questions about who is assessed for creative potential, how creativity assessments can reform educational assessment more broadly, improve students’ creative educational experience and contribute to an equitable and democratizing education.
“We want to fill the gap between research and practice with better ways to identify creative students. When students are selected for gifted and talented programs, it is widely based on intelligence and seldom on creativity tests,” Long said. “If you don’t think a student has high intelligence ability, they won’t be selected for the programs. In school districts, that creativity assessment is used to identify gifted and talented students. It is considered simply a side effect of intelligence. At the same time, we do see promise for creativity assessments in addressing these questions. They can provide more equitable information than they currently do, and we want to push the field forward and do better.”
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