During the next decade, enrollment growth in Information Systems (IS) related majors is unlikely to meet the predicted demand for qualified IS graduates. Gender imbalance in the IS related program makes the situation worse as enrollment and retention of women in the IS major has been proportionately low compared to male. In recent years, majority…

Mentoring is increasingly recognized as a critical element in supporting successful careers in academic research in medicine and related disciplines, particularly for trainees and early career investigators from underrepresented backgrounds. Mentoring is often executed ad hoc; there are limited programs to train faculty to become more effective…

In a historic unanimous vote on May 20, 2015, the Rhode Island Council on Postsecondary Education welcomed College Unbound as a degree-granting postsecondary option in the state, designed to serve the more than 110,000 Rhode Island adults who began but did not complete bachelor's degrees. The college is the adult-learning initiative of Big Picture…

Other than being African American, little is known of Larry, the lead plaintiff in the legal case known as "Larry P. v. Riles" in 1971, which banned the use of standardized intelligence testing on African-American students in the State of California. As a result of such intelligence testing, Larry was diagnosed as being mildly mentally…

Concerns about the (lack of) diversity of the U.S. teacher workforce--and, in particular, the mismatch between the demographics of the teacher workforce and the nation's students--are not new. Recruitment of minorities into teaching has long been a policy goal, particularly in districts with large percentages of minority students (Dometrius &…

Educational opportunities have a very important impact on a person's life. Employment, earnings, well-being, health and trust are all strongly related to education and skills. A lack of high-quality educational opportunities is the most important way in which poverty, social inequality and exclusion are transmitted from one generation to another.…

The 2014 SERA Lecture provides an overview of the concept of inclusive pedagogy, a distinctive approach to classroom teaching offering an alternative pedagogical approach that has the potential to reduce educational inequality by enhancing learning opportunities for everyone. Inclusive pedagogy focuses on improving the quality of mainstream…

Indigenous Australian underrepresentation in higher education remains a topical issue for social scientists, educationalists and policymakers alike, with the concept of indigenous academic success highly contested. This article is based on findings of a doctoral study investigating the drivers of indigenous Australian academic success in a large,…

Mentors rarely receive education about the unique needs of underrepresented scholars in the biomedical and behavioral sciences. We hypothesized that mentor-training and peer-mentoring interventions for these scholars would enrich the perceived quality and breadth of discussions between mentor-protégé dyads (i.e., mentor-protégé pairs). Our…

In this article, we investigate how the national imperative to increase opportunities for young women of color in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) and to broaden their participation was taken up locally at two high schools in one school district. Using ethnographic and longitudinal data, we focus on four young women of…

A solid base of research evidence exists to show that teachers' assessments of children are impacted by their perceptions of those children. From the Pygmalion in the Classroom experiment which powerfully showed that teacher expectations of students impacted those students' performance, to more recent research on teachers' underrating of children…

This article explores the difference between parental involvement, where parents' activity levels at school are primarily structured by schools, and parental engagement, where parents have a more active voice in how they take part in what goes on in schools. This difference is underscored as a means of illuminating ways of addressing the issue of…

Racial disproportionality in special education is a deep seated and complex educational inequity plaguing the United States educational system. In this article we outline how the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, although a civil rights based legislation, cannot sufficiently address racially disproportionate outcomes in special…

Community colleges have received renewed attention from policymakers seeking to increase college attendance and completion rates because they provide open access to postsecondary education for historically marginalized students. Yet, transfer rates from community colleges to 4-year institutions are low. Inequities in opportunity that are shaped by…

The field of bilingual special education is currently plagued with contradictions resulting in a serious underrepresentation of emergent bilinguals with learning disabilities in professional science fields. This underrepresentation is due in large part to the fact that educational systems around the world are inadequately prepared to address the…