Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Characteristics Of Bias Homicides Against The Lgbtqia+ Community, Jeff Gruenewald, Katie Ratcliff

Research Projects

Background: Five people were killed and at least 17 injured on November 19, 2022 just before midnight at Club Q, an LGBTQIA+ club in Colorado Springs, CO. The shooting ended after a 22-year-old gunman wielding an AR-15 style rifle was disarmed by club patrons. Federal, state, and local law enforcement officials continue to investigate the mass shooting. The alleged shooter has been charged with murder and hate crimes.

National Assessment Of Educational Progress (Naep) Results 2022, Sarah C. Mckenzie, Josh B. Mcgee

Policy Briefs

The National Center for Education Statistics has released this year’s NAEP results which measure nationwide student performance in 4th and 8th grade reading and math. NAEP is administered nationally to a representative sample of students from all 50 states, so acts as a standard measure of student performance across states and time. In this policy brief will examine Arkansas’ 2022 results and examine score gaps between student groups.

Northwest Arkansas State Of The Region 2022, Mervin Jebaraj

State of the Northwest Arkansas Region Report

The State of the Northwest Arkansas Region Report is an annual publication, commissioned by the Northwest Arkansas Council, that serves as a tool for evaluating economic performance. In July 2018, the Northwest Arkansas Council created a new blueprint for development in which Northwest Arkansas is benchmarked with other contemporary, high-performing regions, namely Austin, Des Moines, Madison, Durham-Chapel Hill, Raleigh and Provo-Orem.

The 2022 report compares Northwest Arkansas with these geographies in gross domestic product, employment, unemployment, establishment growth, median household income, average annual wages, poverty, educational attainment, research and development, homeownership costs, commuting time, and average domestic airfares. The following …

Ils Transition Mission: Creating Ease For Our Patrons, Marina Narvaez

University Libraries Faculty Publications and Presentations

University of Arkansas Libraries implemented a new library system, OneSearch, that became fully operational in July 2022. In the planning for this transition, collaboration among colleagues outside the committee and preliminary user-feedback became necessary as decisions were finalized. Participants were requested to perform searches on several material types, narrow or broaden their retrieval, and provide general observations. This poster provides information and analysis of the feedback gathered.

Faculty Research Profile: Dr. Shang Jia, Lutishoor Salisbury, Fardy Faustin, Jeremy Smith

University Libraries Faculty Publications and Presentations

This poster was compiled to highlight Dr. Jia’s research as a new research faculty in the Department of the Chemistry and Biochemistry at the University of Arkansas. It provides a summary of his research achievements and his scholarly impact.

Local Norms And Gifted/Talented Identification In Arkansas, Sarah C. Mckenzie, Josh B. Mcgee, Bich Tran, Kathryn Barnes, Charlene A. Reid

Policy Briefs

In this brief, we summarize recent research from OEP examining if using school- or district-level norms from state assessments would increase the racial and programmatic diversity of Arkansas students identified as Gifted and Talented (G/T). Using ten years of administrative data to analyze the outcomes of a local norms approach compared to the current G/T identification strategies, we find no consistent evidence that using a local norms approach for G/T identification would improve racial or programmatic diversity.

Faculty Research Profile: Dr. Dylan Girodat, Lutishoor Salisbury, Fardy Faustin, Jeremy Smith

University Libraries Faculty Publications and Presentations

This poster was compiled to highlight Dr. Girodat’s research as a new faculty in the Department of the Chemistry and Biochemistry at the University of Arkansas. It provides a summary of his research achievements and his scholarly impact.

Faculty Promotion Research Profile: Chenguang Fan, Lutishoor Salisbury, Fardy Faustin, Jeremy Smith

University Libraries Faculty Publications and Presentations

This poster was compiled to commemorate Dr. Fan’s promotion to Associate Professor with Tenure in the Department of the Chemistry and Biochemistry at the University of Arkansas, July 1, 2022. It provides a summary of his research achievements and his scholarly impact.

Arkansas High School Freshmen Course Failures, Sarah C. Mckenzie, Josh B. Mcgee, Charlene A. Reid, Sarah R. Morris

Policy Briefs

In this brief, we examine course failures among Arkansas high school freshmen by different student demographic and programmatic characteristics. We find economically disadvantaged students most likely to fail a course their freshman year. We suggest policies to benefit all student demographic and programmatic characteristics

Which Police Departments Make Black Lives Matter, Which Don’T, And Why Don’T Most Social Scientists Care?, Robert Anthony Maranto, Wilfred Reilly, Patrick Wolf, Mattie Harris

Education Reform Faculty and Graduate Students Publications

In part via skillful use of social media, Black Lives Matter (BLM) has become among the most influential social movements of the past half century, with support across racial lines, and considerable financial backing (Fisher, 2019). Will this translate into public policy reforms which save Black lives? After all, higher education is a key institutional backer of BLM, and a considerable literature dating back decades (e.g., Lindblom & Cohen, 1979) casts doubt on the effectiveness of social science in solving social problems, for numerous reasons. Often, the best social science is simple counting. This paper makes two unique contributions. First, …

Active Learning With Cybersecurity, Carole Shook

TFSC Publications and Presentations

A global campus grant was obtained in Spring 2020 to develop modules for Cybersecurity. This presentation encompasses the use of Cyberciege and case studies that require active learning of students.

Improving Depression Screening And Follow-Up Care In Underserved Populations, Alicia D. Hankins

The Eleanor Mann School of Nursing Student Works

Depression is a substantial source of financial, emotional, and physical burdens to patients and their families worldwide. It also disproportionately affects economically disadvantaged populations. To combat the depression crisis, The United States Preventive Services Task Force (USPSTF) published guidelines to boost depression screenings of all patients presenting for healthcare services. A review of literature and the completed needs assessment confirmed low rates of depression screening in the rural primary care sector. This project took place in an outpatient primary care facility in rural Arkansas, where current depression screening tools were not being used. The goal was to increase the percentage …

The Handy Ir Manager: A Toolkit For Recruitment, Intake, And Promotion, Melody Herr, Jessica Kelly, Cedar C. Middleton

University Libraries Teaching and Learning

You seek fresh strategies for recruiting new collections for your institutional repository (IR). You strive to improve intake workflows and expedite metadata creation for hosted collections. You wonder how to attract users to repository content. If you see yourself in any – or all – of these scenarios, come to this session for inspiration and practical tools.

The Scholarly Communications team will present successful strategies that we’ve developed at the University of Arkansas for recruitment, intake, and promotion, using examples from our work with research centers and student journals.

An Examination Of School Transition On Value-Added Growth In Arkansas, Sarah C. Mckenzie, Josh B. Mcgee, Kathryn Barnes, Charlene A. Reid

Policy Briefs

In this brief, we examine grade-level value-added growth scores during the years that students transition upward to a new building. We used five years of publicly available growth data to compare and make predictions about a grade’s value-added growth for mathematics and ELA during a transition year. We find that transitioning schools in 6th and 7th grade continually has an impact on value-added growth scores.

The “Double Dean”: Embracing The Unexpected Opportunities Of A Non-Librarian Interim Dean, L. Angie Ohler, Adriana Gonzalez, Lynda Coon

University Libraries Faculty Publications and Presentations

Serving as an interim administrator is never an easy thing to do. Walking into an interim administrator position when it is not in your area of expertise… well, that is just crazy. Or is it? A University of Arkansas practice is to fill vacant dean positions with an interim leader who is a current sitting dean from another college. When our former dean announced his departure, the university appointed the dean of the Honors College to serve as interim dean of libraries. For the senior library leadership group, all relatively new associate deans from other academic organizations, this practice at …

Examination Of School Value-Added Growth By Student Population, Sarah C. Mckenzie, Josh B. Mcgee, Charlene A. Reid

Policy Briefs

In this brief, we assess the relationship between Arkansas’ school-level value-added content growth scores for student racial and programmatic groups. We find that on average, African American students receive lower growth scores than other student groups, and that African American elementary students demonstrated large drops in growth since COVID

Charter School Funding Inequities: Rochester, New York, Josh B. Mcgee, Patrick J. Wolf, Larry D. Maloney

School Choice Demonstration Project

Public charter schools are increasingly becoming part of both the broader national conversation about education policy as well as the local urban scene in the United States. The latter is certainly true in Rochester, New York, where charter schools serve more than 18 percent of the students who attend school in the city. Given the important role that charter schools play in educating Rochester’s students, we sought to learn if students who attend the city’s charter schools are funded equitably when compared to students in Rochester City School District (RCSD) schools.

Survey Of The Labor Market For New Ph.D. Hires In Economics 2022-23, Mervin Jebaraj, David Sorto, Raja Kali

Labor Market Survey

This year, the survey questionnaire was sent to 369 organizations. Questionnaires were returned by 144 organizations (39.0 percent). Of this year’s responses, 86 (59.7 percent) were from those who responded to the last survey conducted for the 2021-22 academic year. Among the academic institutions responding, the distribution of highest degrees offered was as follows: Ph.D.—56.3 percent; Master’s—8.3 percent and Bachelor’s—34.7 percent.

The responses are reported for all respondents, and separately for Ph.D. Degree granting institutions and for schools whose highest degree offered is the Bachelor’s or Master’s Degree. Data for the top 30 institutions in the revised National Research Council’s …

Seditious Conspiracy Charges In The American Terrorism Study (Ats), Katie Ratcliff

Research Projects

In January 2022, the U.S. Department of Justice announced Seditious Conspiracy charges against members of the anti-government extremist group Oath Keepers in connection to the January 6th (2021) siege of the U.S. Capitol Building. Several have entered not guilty pleas and a trial is expected in July 2022.

To provide context, this brief offers an overview of 11 Seditious Conspiracy cases included in the American Terrorism Study (ATS) since 1980. In total, these cases involve nine groups (a.k.a."cells" or "plots") and 78 defendants charged with Seditious Conspiracy (18 USC§ 2384), a relatively rare charge that comprises less than one half …