Systemic advantage has a meaningful relationship with grade outcomes in students' early STEM courses at six research universities.

Background: Large introductory lecture courses are frequently post-secondary students' first formal interaction with science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) disciplines. Grade outcomes in these courses are often disparate across student populations, which, in turn, has implications for student retention. This study positions such disparities as a manifestation of systemic inequities along the dimensions of sex, race/ethnicity, income, and first-generation status and investigates the extent to which they are similar across peer institutions. Results: We examined grade outcomes in a selected set of early STEM courses across six large, public, research-intensive universities in the United States over ten years. In this sample of more than 200,000 STEM course enrollments, we find that course grade benefits increase significantly with the number of systemic advantages students possess at all six institutions. The observed trends in academic outcomes versus advantage are strikingly similar across universities despite the fact that we did not control for differences in grading practices, contexts, and instructor and student populations. The findings are concerning given that these courses are often students' first post-secondary STEM experiences. Conclusions: STEM course grades are typically lower than those in other disciplines; students taking them often pay grade penalties. The systemic advantages some student groups experience are correlated with significant reductions in these grade penalties at all six institutions. The consistency of these findings across institutions and courses supports the claim that inequities in STEM education are a systemic problem, driven by factors that go beyond specific courses or individual institutions. Our work provides a basis for the exploration of contexts where inequities are exacerbated or reduced and can be used to advocate for structural change within STEM education. To cultivate more equitable learning environments, we must reckon with how pervasive structural barriers in STEM courses negatively shape the experiences of marginalized students. Supplementary Information: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1186/s40594-024-00474-7.

The benefits of cognitive style versatility for collaborative work.

A growing body of the literature shows the influence of cognitive styles, which capture the ways individuals share, encode, and process information, and their implications for collaboration. We build on this literature to investigate the special contributions of individuals with cognitive style versatility, or facility in more than one cognitive style, for improving teams' collaborative performance. In two studies, including a total of 452 participants in 132 teams, we observe that the presence of cognitively versatile individuals has direct (Study 1) and indirect (Study 2) effects on team performance. In an exploratory analysis, we observe that the presence of cognitively versatile individuals facilitates the task and social processes necessary for effective team information processing, specifically reducing team process conflict and task conflict and enhancing team social integration, with social integration mediating the relationship between cognitive style versatility and team performance. Importantly, these effects remain even when accounting for team cognitive ability and other measures of team surface- and deep-level diversity. Our findings contribute to the emerging literature on team composition and its implications for collaboration and teamwork. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

Cell-phone-based platform for biomedical device development and education applications.

In this paper we report the development of two attachments to a commercial cell phone that transform the phone's integrated lens and image sensor into a 350x microscope and visible-light spectrometer. The microscope is capable of transmission and polarized microscopy modes and is shown to have 1.5 micron resolution and a usable field-of-view of 150 x 50 with no image processing, and approximately 350 x 350 when post-processing is applied. The spectrometer has a 300 nm bandwidth with a limiting spectral resolution of close to 5 nm. We show applications of the devices to medically relevant problems. In the case of the microscope, we image both stained and unstained blood-smears showing the ability to acquire images of similar quality to commercial microscope platforms, thus allowing diagnosis of clinical pathologies. With the spectrometer we demonstrate acquisition of a white-light transmission spectrum through diffuse tissue as well as the acquisition of a fluorescence spectrum. We also envision the devices to have immediate relevance in the educational field.