Search

Professional STEM societies have been identified as an important lever to address STEM diversity, equity, and inclusion. In this "Perspectives" article, we chronicle the highlights of the first Amplifying the Alliance to Catalyze Change for Equity in STEM Success (ACCESS+) convening held in September 2021. Here, we introduce the three-part ACCESS+ approach using a model that entails (i) completion of a DEI self-assessment known as the equity environmental scanning tool, (ii) guided action plan development and iteration, and (iii) sustained participation in a community of practice.

Diversity-focused committees continue to play essential roles in the efforts of professional scientific societies to foster inclusion and facilitate the professional development of underrepresented minority (URM) young scientists in their respective scientific disciplines. Until recently, the efforts of these committees have remained independent and disconnected from one another. Funding from the National Science Foundation has allowed several of these committees to come together and form the Alliance to Catalyze Change for Equity in STEM Success, herein referred to as ACCESS. The overall goal of this meta-organization is to create a community in which diversity-focused committees can interact, synergize, share their collective experiences, and have a unified voice on behalf of URM trainees in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics disciplines. In this Essay, we compare and contrast the broad approaches that scientific societies in ACCESS use to implement and assess their travel award programs for URM trainees. We also report a set of recommendations, including both short- and long-term outcomes assessment in populations of interest and specialized programmatic activities coupled to travel award programs.

Promoting diversity and inclusiveness in the STEM academic workforce remains a key challenge and national priority. Scientific societies can play a significant role in this process through the creation and implementation of programs to foster STEM academic workforce diversification, and by providing mentoring and skills development training that empower scientists from under-represented minority (URM) backgrounds to succeed in their communities of practice. In this article, we provide examples of challenges met by scientific societies in these areas and present data from the American Society for Cell Biology, highlighting the benefits received by trainees through long-term engagement with its programs. The success of these initiatives illustrates the impact of discipline-specific programming by scientific societies in supporting the development of URM scientists and an increasingly diverse and inclusive academic STEM community.

Diversity-focused committees continue to play essential roles in the efforts of professional scientific societies to foster inclusion and facilitate the professional development of underrepresented minority (URM) young scientists in their respective scientific disciplines. Until recently, the efforts of these committees have remained independent and disconnected from one another. Funding from the National Science Foundation has allowed several of these committees to come together and form the Alliance to Catalyze Change for Equity in STEM Success, herein referred to as ACCESS. The overall goal of this meta-organization is to create a community in which diversity-focused committees can interact, synergize, share their collective experiences, and have a unified voice on behalf of URM trainees in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics disciplines. In this Essay, we compare and contrast the broad approaches that scientific societies in ACCESS use to implement and assess their travel award programs for URM trainees. We also report a set of recommendations, including both short- and long-term outcomes assessment in populations of interest and specialized programmatic activities coupled to travel award programs.

Recent studies demonstrate that significant learning gains can be achieved when instructors take intentional steps to address the affective components of learning. While such efforts enhance the outcomes of all students, they are particularly beneficial for students from underrepresented groups and can reduce performance gaps. In the present study, we examined whether intentional efforts to address the affective domain of learning (through growth mindset messaging) can synergize with best practices for addressing the cognitive domain (via active-learning strategies) to enhance academic outcomes in biology courses. We compared the impact of this two-pronged approach (known as dual domain pedagogy, or DDP) with that of two other pedagogies (lecture only or active learning only). Our results demonstrate that DDP is a powerful tool for narrowing performance gaps. DDP, but not active learning, eliminated the performance gap observed between Black and white students in response to lecture. While a significant gap between white and Latin@ students was observed in response to active learning (but not lecture), this gap was reduced by DDP. These findings demonstrate that DDP is an effective approach for promoting a more equitable classroom and can foster learning outcomes that supersede those conferred by active learning alone.

This paper introduces a dynamic model of economic growth and tourism when the environmental dimension is included in the decision‐making process of the agents. In this setup, the economy can be represented by a four‐dimensional dynamic system, which admits a set of four‐dimensional optimal trajectory. Using dynamic programming tools, we aim to study the economic behaviour of a touristic economy in which environmental dimension is considered as a system's component. It is shown that there is a unique non‐trivial equilibrium of all variables. The general results of the study indicate that the variable's dynamic relationships are complex and that the growth guided by the tourism development could exist under the presence of pollution as well as the dynamic of natural resources. The main policy implication of the results is that policy makers should control the main system's variables in order to stay in a desirable path. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Scientific literature has begun to analyze the capacity of tourism as a development instrument, although until now, it has relied on a country level focus. This innovative work analyzes the relationship between tourism and development at a regional level, establishing the hypothesis that tourism affects different dimensions of development (human development, poverty, and income inequality) and, furthermore, that differences exist at a regional level within the same country. Regional data from Spain are used for the 2004–2021 period, applying the Dumitrescu and Hurlin causality test to analyze the relationships between these variables in global terms while also disaggregating between touristic and non‐touristic regions. The results only verify that tourism has a positive effect on improving human development in regions of high tourism intensity. These results suggest the need for tourism policies that are linked to the regional administrative level. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the scientific literature has already shown that there is a causal relationship between tourism and economic growth in island countries, this paper aims, as an additional step, to determine whether there is a causal relationship between tourism and economic development in this type of destination. For this purpose, the Granger causality test is used, applying the econometric adaptation made by Dumitrescu and Hurlin, using a sample of 20 island countries for the period 1995-2019. From the analysis carried out, two results stand out. On the one hand, there is a causal relationship from tourism to economic development. This relationship occurs with a certain delay, to the extent that the public administration takes advantage of the economic growth generated by tourism to finance specific policies that improve the living conditions of the population. On the other hand, it has been shown that there is a causal relationship indicating that development contributes to the expansion of tourism. This is because tourists, in addition to valuing the factors that make a territory or its resources attractive, increasingly demand that destination countries have an adequate level of development in order to obtain a satisfactory tourist experience. Finally, policies are recommended to improve the living conditions of the inhabitants, as well as to reduce the levels of poverty of the population, health, education or security, which will translate into a final improvement of economic development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The authors developed an integrated science-and-art program to engage science students from a performing arts high school in hands-on, inquiry based lab experiences. The students participated in eight biology-focused investigations at a local university with undergraduate mentors. After the laboratory phase of the project, the high school students were charged with generating ideas and producing original science-inspired art to strengthen their science communication skills and comprehension. A culminating exhibit allowed the student artists to share their scientific insights.

The aim of this paper is to analyze the dynamic relationship between economic growth and CO2 emissions for a set of 98 countries over the lengthy period from 1951 to 2014. We describe the topology and hierarchy of countries and introduce a different concept of economic performance based on the idea of dynamic regimes. These regimes are defined by the average levels of per-capita CO2 emissions and the growth rates of per-capita GDP. By presenting a nonparametric clustering technique, the paper identifies two main groups. One cluster can be identified as the group of developed countries, which presents a homogeneous structure and tends toward more similar dynamics over time. The other cluster, associated with developing countries, is homogeneous but the dynamics of the countries do not show convergence. The study also finds some, though little, mobility between the groups. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]