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.

Real-world effectiveness of a social-psychological intervention translated from controlled trials to classrooms.

Social-psychological interventions have raised the learning and performance of students in rigorous efficacy trials. Yet, after they are distributed "in the wild" for students to self-administer, there has been little research following up on their translational effectiveness. We used cutting-edge educational technology to tailor, scale up, and track a previously-validated Strategic Resource Use intervention among 12,065 college students in 14 STEM and Economics classes. Students who self-administered this "Exam Playbook" benefitted by an average of 2.17 percentage points (i.e., a standardized effect size of 0.18), compared to non-users. This effect size was 1.65 percentage points when controlling for college entrance exam scores and 1.75 [-1.88] for adding [dropping] the Exam Playbook in stratified matching analyses. Average benefits differed in magnitude by the conduciveness of the class climate (including peer norms and incentives), gender, first-generation status, as well as how often and how early they used the intervention. These findings on how, when, and who naturally adopts these resources address a need to improve prediction, translation, and scalability of social-psychological intervention benefits.

Computer-Tailored Student Support in Introductory Physics.

Large introductory courses are at a disadvantage in providing personalized guidance and advice for students during the semester. We introduce E2Coach (an Expert Electronic Coaching system), which allows instructors to personalize their communication with thousands of students. We describe the E2Coach system, the nature of the personalized support it provides, and the features of the students who did (and did not) opt-in to using it during the first three terms of its use in four introductory physics courses at the University of Michigan. Defining a 'better-than-expected' measure of performance, we compare outcomes for students who used E2Coach to those who did not. We found that moderate and high E2Coach usage was associated with improved performance. This performance boost was prominent among high users, who improved by 0.18 letter grades on average when compared to nonusers with similar incoming GPAs. This improvement in performance was comparable across both genders. E2Coach represents one way to use technology to personalize education at scale, contributing to the move towards individualized learning that is becoming more attainable in the 21st century.

A gravitationally lensed quasar with quadruple images separated by 14.62 arcseconds.

Gravitational lensing is a powerful tool for the study of the distribution of dark matter in the Universe. The cold-dark-matter model of the formation of large-scale structures (that is, clusters of galaxies and even larger assemblies) predicts the existence of quasars gravitationally lensed by concentrations of dark matter so massive that the quasar images would be split by over 7 arcsec. Numerous searches for large-separation lensed quasars have, however, been unsuccessful. All of the roughly 70 lensed quasars known, including the first lensed quasar discovered, have smaller separations that can be explained in terms of galaxy-scale concentrations of baryonic matter. Although gravitationally lensed galaxies with large separations are known, quasars are more useful cosmological probes because of the simplicity of the resulting lens systems. Here we report the discovery of a lensed quasar, SDSS J1004 + 4112, which has a maximum separation between the components of 14.62 arcsec. Such a large separation means that the lensing object must be dominated by dark matter. Our results are fully consistent with theoretical expectations based on the cold-dark-matter model.