Closing the social class achievement gap for first-generation students in undergraduate biology.

Closing the Social Class Achievement Gap for First-Generation Students in Undergraduate Biology.

Many students start college intending to pursue a career in the biosciences, but too many abandon this goal because they struggle in introductory biology. Interventions have been developed to close achievement gaps for underrepresented minority students and women, but no prior research has attempted to close the gap for first-generation students, a population that accounts for nearly a fifth of...

Journal of Educational Psychology Closing the Social Class Achievement Gap for First-Generation Students in Undergraduate Biology

Closing the social-class achievement gap: a difference-education intervention improves first-generation students' academic performance and all students' college transition.

College students who do not have parents with 4-year degrees (first-generation students) earn lower grades and encounter more obstacles to success than do students who have at least one parent with a 4-year degree (continuing-generation students). In the study reported here, we tested a novel intervention designed to reduce this social-class achievement gap with a randomized controlled trial (N...

Interventions aimed at closing the social class achievement gap: changing individuals, structures, and construals.

Understanding the sources of the social class achievement gap in education is an important step toward ensuring that education serves its purpose as an engine of social mobility. The goal of the current article is to provide a brief overview of the sources of the social class achievement gap as well as interventions aimed at closing this gap. We outline three major sources of the social class a...

Closing the Generation Gap

I describe recent examples of phase transitions in four-dimensional M theory vacua in which the net generation number changes. There are naive obstructions to transitions lifting chiral matter, but loopholes exist which enable us to avoid them. I first review how chirality arises in the heterotic limit of M theory, previously known forms of topology change in string theory, and chirality-changi...