Paul Blowers

Note: Title was current at time of award and may have changed.

Building Faculty Capacity to Retain Students through Classroom Interventions

It may be possible to increase student retention by focusing faculty attention on evidence-based interventions to: (a) develop students’ growth mindset beliefs, (b) foster belongingness among students, (c) support student learning through metacognition, and (d) design opportunities to foster student self-efficacy.  These interventions are cheap and scalable.  This project involves testing subsets of intervention activities with members of a Faculty Learning Community, allowing us to learn whether the interventions work for other professors in other majors and classes, and what the limits are for creating and deploying the interventions designed to improve student retention.

Publications

Hempel, B., Kiehlbaugh, K., Blowers, P. (2020). Scalable and Practical Teaching Practices Faculty Can Deploy to Increase Retention: A Faculty Cookbook for Increasing Student Success. Education for Chemical Engineers, 33, 45-65.  DOI: doi.org/10.1016/j.ece.2020.07.004.

Presentations 

MAR 2021: The Project-to-Publication Pipeline in CUES Sponsored Educational Innovation, CUES Inside UA-Funded Scholarship Series, University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ (Virtual).

OCT 2018: Inside UA-Funded Scholarship: Better Retention Through Simple, Asset-Based Teaching University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ.