The Weekly Recap

Feb 07, 2025

Welcome to this week’s recap! This week we provide details on faculty engagement and highlight recently published research and upcoming events.

The Open Academy: Mary Churchill (Assoc. Dean, BU Wheelock) participated in The Open Academy at Claremont McKenna College, an initiative committed to fostering a culture of open dialogue on campus. She joined Eddie Comeaux (Assoc. Professor, UC Riverside), for a Salon titled Merit or Mistake? Standardized Testing Requirements in College Admissions, where they explored how merit, equity, and equality intersect, whether they can coexist, and what alternative metrics can assess student achievement without standardized tests.
Children’s Book Council: Lee & Low Books’ 2015 Diversity Baseline Survey (DBS) provided the first comprehensive statistics on racial, gender, sexual orientation, and disability representation in the publishing industry. Last week, Laura M. Jiménez (Senior Lecturer, BU Wheelock) joined Lee & Low for a webinar organized by the Children’s Book Council to discuss the survey's origin, evolution, methodology, growth since its first iteration, key takeaways from the 2023 results, and more.

Online Credibility Evaluation: Online credibility evaluation skills in upper secondary students: The role of grade level, argument evaluation, and analytic thinking dispositions (co-authored by Asst. Professor Elena Forzani)
- When learning from online texts, evaluating the credibility of information is important, but people have different levels of skill in doing so. Theoretical frameworks suggest that strong argument evaluation skills and open, flexible thinking dispositions can help people accurately evaluate information, but these relationships have not been empirically well-established. In this study, researchers looked at how well 215 high school students judged the credibility of online texts. They first evaluated four articles about learning styles and later had a chance to reassess their judgments. Researchers examined the roles of grade level and individual differences in both argument evaluation skills as well as in three analytic thinking dispositions (need for cognition, actively open-minded thinking, and cognitive reflection). They found that all of these factors positively contributed to online credibility evaluation, and results suggest that encouraging students' effortful and flexible thinking could support their online credibility evaluation.

February 13th - Learning Their Language: How Parents of Deaf Children Learn to Sign. Join the SPACE Office for the second session in the webinar series, Research that Matters: Insights from Community-Engaged Scholarship. Moderated by Stacy Abrams, founder of #WhyISign, this webinar will feature Amy Lieberman, Associate Professor at BU Wheelock; Elana Pontecorvo, Doctoral Student at Boston University Sargent College; and Julie Mitchiner, Professor at Gallaudet University, as they discuss their recent research exploring the misconception that hearing parents cannot achieve sufficient sign language proficiency to support their deaf child's language development. The webinar will be accessible in both ASL and English. Register here.
📅 Date: February 13, 2025
🕒 Time: 3:30 - 4:15 PM EST
March 1st & 2nd – New England Regional Association for Applied Sport Psychology Conference. The Sport Psychology program at Boston University Wheelock College of Education & Human Development is hosting the 2025 New England Regional Association for Applied Sport Psychology conference! The conference is March 1st and 2nd at Boston University's Rajen Kilachand Center for Integrated Life Sciences and Engineering, 610 W Commonwealth Ave. Learn more and register here.