Search results

The purpose of this paper is to lay out the data competence maturity model (DCMM) and discuss how the application of the model can serve as a foundation for a measured and deliberate use of data in secondary education.

Although the model is new, its implications, and its application are derived from key findings and best practices from the software development, data analytics and secondary education performance literature. These principles can guide educators to better manage student and operational outcomes. This work builds and applies the DCMM model to secondary education.

The conceptual model reveals significant opportunities to improve data-driven decision making in schools and local education agencies (LEAs). Moving past the first and second stages of the data competency maturity model should allow educators to better incorporate data into the regular decision-making process.

Moving up the DCMM to better integrate data into their decision-making process has the potential to produce profound improvements for schools and LEAs. Data science is about making better decisions. Understanding the path laid out in the DCMM to helping an organization move to a more mature data-driven decision-making process will help improve both student and operational outcomes.

This paper brings a new concept, the DCMM, to the educational literature and discusses how these principles can be applied to improve decision making by integrating them into their decision-making process and trying to help the organization mature within this framework.

Building on work that explores the relationship between individual beliefs and ability to recognize discrimination (e.g., Kaiser and Major, 2006), we examine how an adherence to beliefs about gender essentialism, gender egalitarianism, and meritocracy shape one’s interpretation of an illegal act of sexual harassment involving a male supervisor and female subordinate. We also consider whether the role of the gendered culture of engineering (Faulkner, 2009) matters for this relationship. Specifically, we conducted an online survey-experiment asking individuals to report their beliefs about gender and meritocracy and subsequently to evaluate a fictitious but illegal act of sexual harassment in one of two university research settings: an engineering department, a male-dominated setting whose culture is documented as being unwelcoming to women (Hatmaker, 2013; Seron, Silbey, Cech, and Rubineau, 2018), and an ambiguous research setting. We find evidence that the stronger one’s adherence to gender egalitarian beliefs, the greater one’s ability to detect inappropriate behavior and sexual harassment while gender essentialist beliefs play no role in their detection. The stronger one’s adherence to merit beliefs, the less likely they are to view an illegal interaction as either inappropriate or as sexual harassment. We account for respondent knowledge of sexual harassment and their socio-demographic characteristics, finding that the former is more often associated with the detection of inappropriate behavior and sexual harassment at work. We close with a discussion of the transferability of results and policy implications of our findings.

Women pursuing male-dominated careers face well-documented barriers to career success (e.g., stereotypes, sexual harassment, limited access to professional networks, and mentoring), which have the potential to be exacerbated or diminished by the increasing prevalence of work from home (WFH). In this chapter, the authors first review key career obstacles for women in male-dominated fields and analyse the impact of WFH on these barriers and, second, provide actionable strategies for organisations to implement WFH in a way that promotes rather than hampers the success of women in these fields. Both career obstacles and WFH remedies are considered through an overarching framework focussed on the significance of work–family boundary management, inclusion, and career advancement. Drawing on the extant research, the authors provide evidence-based, actionable guidance to help organisations and supervisors leverage WFH to support the career success of women in male-dominated careers.

The ideal worker norm refers to the belief that employees can and should be singularly devoted to work. Our purpose is to understand the extent to which workers buy into various components of ideal work and how unpopular components of the ideal worker norm persist. We hypothesize they persist, at least in part, because of pluralistic ignorance. Pluralistic ignorance entails situations in which most people privately reject a norm, but incorrectly assume others accept it.

Drawing on original survey data, we examine the extent to which US workers subscribe to a range of factors described in the ideal work literature. We test the pluralistic ignorance hypothesis by comparing workers’ agreement with, and their perceptions of their coworkers’ agreement with, these factors.

We find workers embrace some components of ideal work. Yet, regardless of gender or parental status, they dislike those components that involve working extremely long hours and prioritizing work at the expense of personal or family life. In addition, regardless of gender or parental status, workers experience pluralistic ignorance with respect to those components that involve prioritizing work at the expense of personal or family life.

Our findings suggest that researchers distinguish between different components of ideal work. They also suggest that everyone – not just women or parents – desire work–family balance. Lastly, because people often behave in ways that are congruent with what they mistakenly believe to be the norm, our findings suggest workers may unintentionally perpetuate family-unfriendly workplace standards.

In elite professional firms, minorities are actively recruited but struggle to move upward. The authors argue that initiatives aimed at general skill development can have unintended consequences for firm diversity. Specifically, the authors contend that approaches that win partner support through motivational significance and interpretive clarity provide a more effective avenue to skill development for minorities, who have less access than White peers to informal developmental opportunities. The authors also argue that a longer “partnership track,” which imposes a time limit on skill development, will benefit minority professionals. Using data on 601 offices of large US law firms in 1996 and 2005, the authors investigate the effects of five developmental initiatives and partnership track length on the representation of African-Americans, Latinxs, and Asian-Americans among partners. Observed effects are consistent with expectations, but patterns vary across racial-ethnic groups.

This chapter tackles the tension between equity and excellence that critics often highlight in opposition of diversity initiatives and efforts in the higher education employment setting. We present several arguments that respond to the assumptions undergirding these criticisms, by drawing on prior research to emphasize that equity and excellence are not mutually exclusive. Furthermore, we present new evidence from a national sample of Black and Hispanic Engineering Faculty (BHEF) (n = 68) to argue that their racialized work experiences promote exclusive environments that serve to sustain their underrepresentation and marginalize their performance contributions. We conclude with a new direction for how to cultivate inclusive work environments in higher education.

Little attention has been given to the mental and physical health impacts of COVID-19 on the academic public health workforce. Academic public health is an important support mechanism for public health practice, providing expertise and workforce training, conducting research, disseminating evidence-based scientific information to both public health and lay audiences, and serving as a supplementary workforce when additional resources are needed. These roles become more important during a public health emergency, particularly during a prolonged public health crisis like the COVID-19 pandemic. As a result of the COVID-19 response, the roles of academic public health have expanded to include developing and implementing contact tracing, surveillance, testing, and vaccination programs for universities and their surrounding communities, all while continuing to prepare students and support the public health practice workforce in their ongoing efforts. As in other responder groups, this has resulted in significant mental health effects and burnout among public health academicians. The authors suggest important steps that can be taken to improve the resilience of the academic public health workforce and to support their contributions during prolonged public health emergencies.