American Research Universities Research Articles

Public–private partnerships in fostering outer space innovations

As public and private institutions recognize the role of space exploration as a catalyst for economic growth, various areas of innovation are expected to emerge as drivers of the space economy. These include space transportation, in-space manufacturing, bioproduction, in-space agriculture, nuclear launch, and propulsion systems, as well as satellite services and their maintenance. However, the current nature of space as an open-access resource and global commons presents a systemic risk for exuberant competition for space goods and services, which may result in a “tragedy of the commons” dilemma. In the race among countries to capture the value of space exploration, NASA, American research universities, and private companies can avoid any coordination failures by collaborating in a public–private research and development partnership (PPRDP) structure. We present such a structure founded upon the principles of polycentric autonomous governance, which incorporate a decentralized autonomous organization framework and specialized research clusters. By advancing an alignment of incentives among the specified participatory members, PPRDPs can play a pivotal role in stimulating open-source research by creating positive knowledge spillover effects and agglomeration externalities as well as embracing the nonlinear decomposition paradigm that may blur the distinction between basic and applied research.

Academic data science: Transdisciplinary and extradisciplinary visions.

As a nascent field within the academy, the contours, attributes, and bounties of data science are still indeterminate and contested. We studied how participants in an initiative to establish data science at a large American research university defined data science and articulated their relationships to the field. We discuss two contrasting visions for data science among our research participants. One vision is a transdisciplinary view portraying data science as a phenomenon with transcendent, appropriative, and impositional qualities that sits apart from academic domains. Another view of data science-one that was far more prevalent among our research subjects-casts data science as grounded, relational, and adaptive, emerging from crosspollination of numerous academic domains. We argue that this latter formulation represents a more quotidian reality of data science and positions the field as an extradiscipline, defined as a field that exists to facilitate the exchange of knowledge, skills, tools, and methods from an indeterminate and fluctuating set of disciplinary perspectives while conserving the boundaries of those disciplines. We argue that the dueling transdisciplinary and extradisciplinary visions for data science have important implications for how the field will mature, and that the extradiscipline concept opens novel directions for studying academic knowledge production in STS, contributing additional precision to the literature on disciplinarity and its permutations.

Combining GitHub, Chat, and Peer Evaluation Data to Assess Individual Contributions to Team Software Development Projects

Objectives.    Assessing team software development projects is notoriously difficult and typically based on subjective metrics. To help make assessments more rigorous, we conducted an empirical study to explore relationships between subjective metrics based on peer and instructor assessments, and objective metrics based on GitHub and chat data. Participants.    We studied 23 undergraduate software teams ( n = 117 students) from two undergraduate computing courses at two North American research universities. Study Method.    We collected data on teams’ (a) commits and issues from their GitHub code repositories; (b) chat messages from their Slack and Microsoft Teams channels; (c) peer evaluation ratings from the CATME peer evaluation system, and (d) individual assignment grades from the courses. We derived metrics from (a) and (b) to measure both individual team members’ contributions to the team, and the equality of team members’contributions. We then performed Pearson analyses to identify correlations among the metrics, peer evaluation ratings, and individual grades. Findings.    We found significant positive correlations between team members’ GitHub contributions, chat contributions, and peer evaluation ratings. In addition, the equality of teams’ GitHub contributions was positively correlated with teams’ average peer evaluation ratings, and negatively correlated with the variance in those ratings. However, no such positive correlations were detected between the equality of teams’ chat contributions and their peer evaluation ratings. Conclusions.    Our study extends previous research results by providing evidence that (a) team members’ chat contributions, like their GitHub contributions, are positively correlated with their peer evaluation ratings; (b) team members’ chat contributions are positively correlated with their GitHub contributions; and (c) the equality of team’ GitHub contributions is positively correlated with their peer evaluation ratings. These results lend further support to the idea that combining objective and subjective metrics can make the assessment of team software projects more comprehensive and rigorous.

Modularization for mastery learning in CS1: a 4-year action research study.

Computer programming is a skill of increasing importance in scientific and technological fields. However, in introductory computer science (CS1) courses in higher education, approximately one in every three students fails. A common reason is that students are overwhelmed by an accelerated and inflexible pace of learning that jeopardizes success. Accordingly, in the computer science education literature it has been suggested that the pedagogical philosophy of 'mastery learning,' which supports students progressing at their own pace, can improve academic outcomes of CS1 courses. Nevertheless, few extended mastery learning implementations in CS1 have been documented in the literature, and there is a lack of guidance and best practices to foster its adoption. In this paper, we present a four-year action research study in which a modular mastery-based CS1 course was designed, evaluated and improved in successive iterations with cohorts of engineering freshmen in a Latin American research university (N = 959). In the first year of the intervention, only 19.3% of students passed the course in their first semester attempting it. In successive iterations, the instructional design, teaching and learning activities, course content, and course management were iteratively improved such that by the fourth year of offering 77.1% of students passed the course in their first semester. Over this period, course attrition was reduced from 25.0% to 3.8% of the cohort, and students' mean time spent in the course decreased from 23.2weeks (SD = 7.38) to 14.9 (SD = 3.64). Results indicate that modularization for mastery learning is a viable approach for improving academic results in a CS1 course. Practical considerations towards successful implementation of this approach are presented and discussed.

In pursuit of a global mindset: Toward a theory-driven pedagogy

ABSTRACT Despite decades of research on the global mind-set concept, no cohesive framework has emerged through which this way-of-thinking can be developed in learners, leading some to perceive the global mind-set as elusive. To move the literature forward, I propose a theory-driven pedagogy which combines insights from the extant global mind-set literature with the key tenets of transformative learning theory. On that basis, five course design principles are distilled along transformational learning phases which delineate the process through which learners can advance their ability to handle cognitive complexity and foster a cosmopolitan perspective. The importance of the learners’ agency and interdependency between learning elements is highlighted. The efficacy of this approach, which was first applied to a graduate-level course at a large North American research university in the 2021 winter semester, receives promising preliminary support. Specifically, while little difference exists across all courses in the sample with regards to quantitative scores, a qualitative text analysis of comments suggests that the course design framework generates distinct response patterns, specifically with regards to the categories of learning experience (cognitive complexity) and broadening of perspectives (cosmopolitan orientation). Implications for future research opportunities on the development of global mind-sets in practice are discussed.

UC Merced Through a Socio-Environmental Imagination Lens

The socio-environmental imagination will be applied to the University of California, Merced, in hopes to understand the connection between society and UC Merced. UC Merced is located in Merced, California. It is the 10th university in the UC system and the first American research university of the 21st century. It has both undergraduate and graduate divisions. Consisting of three schools: Engineering, Natural Sciences, and the Social Sciences, Humanities, and Arts. There are currently two schools in the making, the E&J Gallo School of Management and a future medical school, which will begin enrolling students in 2023. UC Merced is the leading UC campus with the highest percentage of students from underrepresented ethnic/racial groups, low-income families, and first-generation students. I decided to choose UC Merced for my research because I am a first-generation, low-income, UC Merced student, and I wanted to add onto my knowledge of campus. The socio-environmental imagination can be seen as a framework that analyzes personal troubles as social issues which can then lead to environmental issues. This framework consists of three infrastructures. Those being cultural infrastructures (CI), material infrastructures (MI), and ecological infrastructures (EI). Cultural/social infrastructure refers to the organization of ideas, social norms, values, policies, and institutions. Material infrastructure is the organization of things to produce. This infrastructure focuses on building materials, scientific compounds, and the structure of a place. Ecological infrastructure refers to the ecology and environment. It is useful to know about the different infrastructures of the university since they impact the students culturally, financially, and environmentally. These factors impact the city of Merced, public policies, and people who do not attend the university. The socio-environmental imagination is important because it allows us to see how social issues can be interrelated to environmental justice problems. In this paper, I will apply the socioenvironmental imagination to UC Merced, in order to explore the interconnection between UC MERCED THROUGH A SOCIO-ENVIRONMENTAL IMAGINATION LENS 3 society’s values to production and its corresponding environmental impacts on ecosystems and workers.

STEM Librarians’ Presence on Academic Profile Websites

ABSTRACT This study explores STEM librarians’ presence on academic profile websites (APWs) at American and Canadian research universities. It was found that Google Scholar Citations was the most used APW, followed by ResearchGate, ORCiD, and academia.edu. The rate of profile without a publication list in ORCiD of these librarians was significantly lower than other users across this platform, suggesting that it may be necessary for ORCiD to improve the publication addition function in order to help other users to increase their presence. The social networking functions were not well adopted, as such, ResearchGate’s composite metric, RG Score, adds little new information to bibliometric indicators.

Toward institutionalization of responsible innovation in the contemporary research university: insights from case studies of Arizona State University

ABSTRACT A comprehensive organizational reconceptualization undertaken by Arizona State University (ASU) during the past two decades has been motivated in part by an explicit intent to institutionalize reflexive understandings of societal responsibility within a major public research university. In the process of operationalizing new models for the American research university, ASU embarked on an academic reorganization that institutionalized the conditions for responsible innovation. Indeed, this institutionalization proceeded contemporaneously with—and in some cases preceded—the systematic articulation of responsible innovation discourses by an international community of scholars. As a transformed and transformational institution, the case of ASU points to the need for research universities to rethink societal responsibility.

Smart campus communication, Internet of Things, and data governance: Understanding student tensions and imaginaries

In recent years, universities have been urged to restructure and re-evaluate their ability to trace and monitor their students as the “smart campus” is being built upon datafication, while networked apps and sensors serve as the means through which its constituents are connected and governed. This paper advances a dialectical and communication-centered approach to the Internet of Things campus ecosystem and provides an empirical investigation into (a) the tensions experienced by students and (b) the ways that these students envision alternative practices that support their digital engagement. Drawing upon student focus group interviews in a large American research and innovation intensive university, dialectical tensions identified include convenience–annoyance, integration–independence, and safety–insecurity, brought upon by students’ ongoing and prospective negotiations with Internet of Things. Furthermore, in a bid to understand students’ alternative data imaginaries, this project examined students’ preferred Internet of Things-related communication practices with campus digital application platforms, analog and older forms of digital media, as well as in-person interactions with traditional authorities within classroom and group settings. Finally, this contribution presents a discussion of the findings for theory and praxis, particularly for smart campus innovation and social data governance, in terms of potential growing challenges involving complexifying student privacy concerns, data normalization and coercion, and tertiary digital divides and inequalities.

Beyond survey measures: exploring international male graduate students’ sense of belonging in electrical engineering

PurposeAlthough a student’s sense of belonging is a key factor of persistence in higher education, research on international students’ belonging tends to rely on domain-agnostic survey measures and promote interpretations that focus mainly on social integration and adjustment. This paper aims to examine how male international graduate students in engineering understand and describe their sense of belonging and how they perceive its development at their institution.Design/methodology/approachThe authors conducted in-depth interviews with 12 male electrical engineering doctoral students at a selective research university in the USA. This interpretive approach allowed students to articulate their subjective understanding of belonging within a specific disciplinary context.FindingsContrary to the broad notion that the social domain is the primary locus of students’ sense of belonging, participants emphasized the academic domain when referring to their struggles with, and attempts to develop, a sense of belonging. Results suggest that the meritocratic culture of engineering education may influence students to prioritize the academic domain when conceptualizing and developing their belonging. Moreover, the strong academic motivation endemic to international students pursuing graduate education at a top American research university intensified this mechanism.Originality/valueThis study argues that universities seeking to enhance international graduate students’ sense of belonging can be more intentional in providing opportunities for students to establish positive academic identities. Furthermore, addressing students’ non-academic identity and marginalization as relevant and essential topics in engineering will expand their understanding of what means to belong.

Application of Artificial Intelligence Techniques in Operating Mode of Professors’ Academic Governance in American Research Universities

Artificial intelligence technology is an important transformative force for teaching innovation in the intelligent era. It is being widely used in American school teaching, including the design of intelligent tutoring systems to achieve precise problem solving, the machine learning technology to ensure personalized activity design, the creation of intelligent virtual reality to promote classroom teaching contextualization, and the development of intelligent evaluation systems to ensure the scientific evaluation of capabilities. In the process of advancing the teaching and application of artificial intelligence technology, the United States has built a linkage mechanism of federal leadership, university follow-up, and social collaboration and implemented the smart technology in school teaching and professors’ academic governance. This paper is aimed at studying the professors’ academic governance of American research universities by Internet data mining, historical analysis method, documentary method, survey method, and other methods. Professors’ academic governance is a vital part of the modern university system that causes the institutional reform of the internal governance structure of modern universities. The United States is a powerful country in higher education, and professors in American research universities have always participated in university academic governance for centuries. By studying the definition, history, and development and mode of operation of professors’ academic governance in American research universities, the results indicate a clear division of power and responsibility between the professors and administrators based on an artificial intelligence decision system in American research universities. Also, there is a good communication platform based on artificial intelligence environment for professors to discuss their opinions on academic affairs. Third, professors exercise academic power under the guarantee of diversified guaranteed systems based on the artificial intelligence evaluation system and the ideology of mutual respect based on the artificial intelligence management and service system. Studying the application of artificial intelligence techniques in operating mode and enlightenment of professors’ academic governance in an American research university is of great significance to promote the construction of other modern universities’ professors’ academic governance system.

Academic professionals: The changing face of teaching, research, and service in the American research university

This exploratory study responds to the criticism that non-instructional faculty or “academic professionals” at American universities are the cause of “administrative bloat.” The purpose of the study was to build from the work of Rhoades (1998) and Kane (2007) to examine whether academic professionals at an R-1 (very-high research activity university) performed core university work of research, teaching, and/or public service. A survey of 1036 academic professionals suggested that many of these individuals were routinely and directly contributing to research, teaching, and public service instead of administrative work, failing to contribute to any notions of “administrative bloat.” In addition to the three areas of core work, academic professionals often had advanced degrees, published in peer-reviewed journals, had specialized skills and bodies of knowledge, applied for grants, and engaged in entrepreneurial activities. The study concludes with a discussion of academic professionals in European countries and the role of disruptive innovation and new professionalism in compelling universities to expand the use of academic professionals in order to produce cheaper degree alternatives and generate new sources of funding .

American Scientists’ Willingness to Use Different Communication Tactics

The careful choice of tactics—such as specific messages, styles, channels, or sources—is how strategic science communicators ensure that the time and money going into communication results in intended changes to chosen audiences’ beliefs, feelings, and frames, as well as associated behaviors. Using a sample of scientists from American research universities ( N = 516), we assess scientists’ willingness to use 11 different communication tactics and the relationship between these tactics and potential predictors. We find that scientists are open to a range of communication tactics. Practical and theoretical implications for science communication are discussed.

Book Reviews

Michael Andrews of University of Maryland, Baltimore County reviews “Markets, Minds, and Money: Why America Leads the World in University Research” by Miguel Urquiola. The Econlit abstract of this book begins: “Examines the free market approach to education in the United States, addressing how American research universities rose to preeminence and why they have retained their status in the world.”

Predicting time to graduation at a large enrollment American university.

The time it takes a student to graduate with a university degree is mitigated by a variety of factors such as their background, the academic performance at university, and their integration into the social communities of the university they attend. Different universities have different populations, student services, instruction styles, and degree programs, however, they all collect institutional data. This study presents data for 160,933 students attending a large American research university. The data includes performance, enrollment, demographics, and preparation features. Discrete time hazard models for the time-to-graduation are presented in the context of Tinto’s Theory of Drop Out. Additionally, a novel machine learning method: gradient boosted trees, is applied and compared to the typical maximum likelihood method. We demonstrate that enrollment factors (such as changing a major) lead to greater increases in model predictive performance of when a student graduates than performance factors (such as grades) or preparation (such as high school GPA).

Who’s writing open access (OA) articles? Characteristics of OA authors at Ph.D.-granting institutions in the United States

The open access (OA) publication movement aims to present research literature to the public at no cost and with no restrictions. While the democratization of access to scholarly literature is a primary focus of the movement, it remains unclear whether OA has uniformly democratized the corpus of freely available research, or whether authors who choose to publish in OA venues represent a particular subset of scholars—those with access to resources enabling them to afford article processing charges (APCs). We investigated the number of OA articles with article processing charges (APC OA) authored by 182,320 scholars with known demographic and institutional characteristics at American research universities across 11 broad fields of study. The results show, in general, that the likelihood for a scholar to author an APC OA article increases with male gender, employment at a prestigious institution (AAU member universities), association with a STEM discipline, greater federal research funding, and more advanced career stage (i.e., higher professorial rank). Participation in APC OA publishing appears to be skewed toward scholars with greater access to resources and job security.

Student evaluations of teaching: unidimensionality, subjectivity, and biases

ABSTRACT This work contributes to the literature raising concerns with the use of SET (student teaching evaluation) scores to evaluate teaching effectiveness and to motivate or demotivate faculty tenure and promotion decisions. It shows that the non-deterministic and qualitative nature of the SETs controverts their analysis and interpretation. It also reinforces empirical evidence that the SET usage introduces multiple biases related to professor, course, and class characteristics and facilitates grade inflation. This study exploits a large data set coming from an American research university.

PROFESSIONAL TRAINING OF TEACHERS-PHILOLOGISTS IN AMERICAN HIGHER EDUCATION INSTITUTIONS

The article reveals the peculiarities of the American professional training of teachers of philology. The source base is analyzed and the lack of a common understanding of the concept of teacher training model, as well as the identification of concepts of models and approaches to the training of teachers of philology. The problematic issues of interdisciplinary training of teachers-philologists of integrative type for expanding opportunities for professional realization in the modern labor market are identified. The purpose of education and prestige of three types of master's and doctoral schools in American research universities are determined: the school of humanities and natural sciences; vocational schools of medicine, law and entrepreneurship; school of pedagogical education. The article considers such models of training of teachers of philology as intuitive, artistic and craft, scientific and applied, reflective, experimental, critical, collaborative, alternative, which allowed to substantiate scientific and methodological recommendations for improving the professional training of teachers of philology: development and introduction of an alternative model of training of teachers-philologists (alternative educational programs); development of mechanisms to stimulate students of philology to research activities; introduction of innovative teaching methods and technologies on the basis of interactivity, facilitation, collaboration, work in an interdisciplinary team, cooperation and constructive socialization; awareness of the need for interdisciplinary knowledge and skills, professional self-development. It was found that the models of teacher training in the United States have much in common with other countries of the European educational space, and the only model that is purely American is an alternative model of teacher training. Scientific and methodological recommendations for improving the professional training of teachers of philology in Ukraine on the basis of theoretical, organizational and didactic models of professional training in the United States are outlined.

Exploring scholars' public engagement goals in Canada and the United States.

We have little systematic knowledge about scholars' goals for public engagement in the academic literature. This study therefore provides a secondary analysis of two surveys of scholars that included closed-ended questions about goals. One survey from 2017 was from a sample of Canadian grant recipients from a federal science funding agency, while the second survey from 2018 comes from a sample of professors at top American research universities. The focus of this research is on both presenting novel data about scholars' expressed goals and exploring the relationships between these goals and potential predictors of these goals, including demographics, past engagement behavior, and overall views about public engagement. Areas for future research are then described.

Toward Easy Deposit: Lowering the Barriers of Green Open Access with Data Integration and Automation

This article describes the design and development of an interoperable application that supports green open access with long-term sustainability and improved user experience of article deposit. The lack of library resources and the unfriendly repository user interface are two significant barriers that hinder green open access. Tasked to implement the open access mandate, librarians at an American research university developed a comprehensive system called Easy Deposit 2 to automate the support workflow of green open access. Easy Deposit 2 is a web application that is able to harvest new publications, to source manuscripts on behalf of the library, and to facilitate self-archiving to a university’s institutional repository. The article deposit rate increased from 7.40% to 25.60% with the launch of Easy Deposit 2. The results show that a computer system can implement routine tasks to support green open access with success. Recent developments in digital repository provide new opportunities for innovation, such as Easy Deposit 2, in supporting open access. Academic librarians are vital in promoting “openness” in scholarly communication, such as transparency and diversity in the sharing of publication data.