Each year, Arizona State University names faculty from across the university as President’s Professors. This prestigious designation has honored dozens of faculty members since 2006 and continues to do so for faculty who showcase enthusiasm and innovation in teaching, the ability to inspire original and creative work by students, mastery of subject matter, and scholarly contributions. RISE Center Affiliate Sharon Hall was named a President's Professor for 2022.
RISE Center Director Sara Brownell was interviewed about supporting LGBTQ+ students in higher education and creating LGBTQ+ inclusive learning spaces.
RISE Center PhD student Carly Busch was invited to contribute a blog post for the American Society of Microbiology. She highlights some impactful yet easy ways we can create more LGBTQIA-inclusive biology learning environments.
Fear of negative evaluation, or the dread associated with being judged in a social situation, is the most common factor underlying student anxiety in active learning courses. This project aims to help students cope with fear of negative evaluation by developing and testing a single-session intervention (an approach shown to be tremendously effective in reducing symptoms of anxiety in the K-12 population) to help undergraduates cope with fear of negative evaluation in the context of active learning science courses.
The goal of Dr. Cooper's NSF CAREER award is to examine how graduate research and teaching alleviate and exacerbate symptoms of anxiety and depression among science graduate students. This project also proposes to develop single-session interventions to help graduates cope with common challenges (e.g. failure, negative feedback) known to worsen student mental health.
RISE Center member Katey Cooper created a course-based undergraduate research experience (CURE) with the aim to engage students in real, publishable biology education research. In the span of a single semester, Katey Cooper's students went from an initial research question to a finished research manuscript that was submitted to a peer-reviewed education journal with all 14 students as co-authors exactly three weeks after the end of the term.
As online learning continues to see significant growth at higher education institutions around the country, The College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at Arizona State University is expanding opportunities that are traditionally offered in person to the digital environment with the launch of the Online Undergraduate Research Scholars (OURS) program. The new program will offer hands-on, experiential learning specifically for students enrolled through ASU Online.
RISE Center research on helping people reconcile religion and evolution was featured in a video produced by the AAAS Dialogue on Science, Ethics, and Religion.
The National Center for Science Education wrote about the RISE Center's work exploring the relationship between evolution and student religious beliefs.
In recognition of research accomplishments and plans for graduate work, three Arizona State University School of Life Sciences students have been named 2022 Graduate Research Fellows by the National Science Foundation along with existing winners Carly Busch and Logan Gin.