Solicitation of Applications for Interdisciplinary Events – Funding Opportunities

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The Office of Interdisciplinary & Cross Campus Affairs (ICCA) is pleased to announce two funding opportunities, including an opportunity to bring outstanding scholars to Campus to promote interdisciplinary and cross campus education, research, and service at UCLA. In addition to the Visiting Speaker funding, ICCA will also be accepting proposals for its Symposia, Workshop, and Planning Meeting funding opportunity.

The goal of these programs is to encourage Schools, Divisions, and other units to find areas of mutual programmatic interest and to support faculty in their exploration of these intersections.

These opportunities are open to all UCLA faculty members. Proposals must include collaborations of faculty from multiple schools or research units to be considered for funding. Please see ICCA’s Funding Opportunities web page for information specific to each opportunity. Priority for both awards will be given to collaborative events that engage a diverse range of faculty and/or students across schools.

Applications Deadline: Sunday, April 7, 2019

America’s Underutilized Resource for Strengthening the STEM Workforce

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-The National Academies Press

Research suggests that the cultural diversity of a nation’s workforce is a key factor in its ability to innovate and compete in a global economy. This report on the role of Minority Serving Institutions (MSIs) in creating a diverse science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) workforce is motivated by the realization that the United States is unlikely to maintain its competitive advantage in STEM without the contributions that these institutions are uniquely positioned to make.

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Recent Research in Science Teaching and Learning

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-CBE Life Sciences

The Current Insights feature is designed to introduce life science educators and researchers to current articles of interest in other social science and education journals. In this installment, I highlight three diverse research studies: one addresses the relationships between active learning and teaching evaluations; one presents an observation tool for documenting metacognition in the classroom; and the last explores things teachers can say to encourage students to employ scientific reasoning during class discussions.

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Will my Student Evaluations Decrease if I Adopt an Active Learning Instructional Strategy?

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-AAPT

College instructors are often afraid to use active learning instructional strategies because they fear that students may complain and/or give them lower evaluations of teaching. In this paper, we present data from a survey of 431 physics instructors who had attended the Physics and Astronomy New Faculty Workshop and who attempted to incorporate active learning into their introductory course. Nearly half of respondents (48%) felt that their student evaluations increased, one-third (32%) felt that their student evaluations had not been impacted, and one-fifth (20%) felt that their student evaluations decreased. Thus, contrary to common fears, for these instructors the most likely result from the incorporation of active learning was an increase in student evaluations.

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University of New Hampshire is Now Accepting Applications for the Postdoctoral Diversity and Innovation Scholars Program

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A description of the program and the (5 postdoc cohort of diverse scholars each year) appears on their website at www.unh.edu/diverse-postdoc. A minimum salary of $50,000 (depending on discipline) and a professional development program and professional development fund are also provided. On the website you will find a PDF electronic card that describes the range of professional development opportunities which in particular includes a research mentoring network, participation in in-depth faculty development programs and the opportunity during the second postdoctoral year to apply for a tenure track faculty openings. They have postdoctoral opening in seven department across three colleges including the College of Life Sciences and Agriculture, the College of Health and Human Services and the Peter T. Paul College of Business and Economics.

For questions please contact patricia.walsh@unh.edu who can set up an appointment with either Julie Williams, PhD senior vice provost or Leslie Couse, PhD executive director in the Office of Engagement & Faculty Development.

Application Deadline: March 29, 2019

The Effects of Doctoral Teaching Development on Early-Career STEM Scholars’ College Teaching Self-efficacy

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– CBE Life Sciences

To help prepare future faculty in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) to teach undergraduates, more research universities are offering teaching development (TD) programs to doctoral students who aspire to academic careers. Using social cognitive career theory, we examine the effects of TD programs on early-career STEM scholars’ sense of self-efficacy as postsecondary teachers.

The Impact of a Pedagogy Course on the Teaching Beliefs of Inexperienced Graduate Teaching Assistants

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– CBE Life Sciences

There has been little attention given to teaching beliefs of graduate teaching assistants (GTAs), even though they represent the primary teaching workforce for undergraduate students in discussion and laboratory sections at many research universities. Secondary school education studies have shown that teaching beliefs are malleable and can be shaped by professional development, particularly for inexperienced teachers. This study characterized inexperienced GTAs’ teaching beliefs about student learning and how they change with a science-specific pedagogy course that emphasized student learning.