Senior Lecturer Lezlie Christensen Branum has successfully defended her dissertation, earning her PhD in Curriculum Design and Instruction. Lezlie’s dissertation is a qualitative multiple case study of myside bias shifting in students’ written argumentative work in response to curriculum designed to mitigate it. Myside bias is defined as uncritical fact-gathering in response to one’s own views, which can be harmful to productive discourse and critical thinking. Ultimately, Lezlie argues thatfor academic, personal, and civic reasons, teachers should understand the factors implicated in myside bias and adopt strategies to help students not only recognize their own biases, but to better understand how biases are enacted in discourses that involve multiple perspectives and the contexts that shape those perspectives.
Mufti Nadimul Quamar Ahmed is a graduate student in his second year, pursuing a doctorate in sociology at USU. He recently helped survey Utahns to see if environmental concerns affect the decision to have children.
Utah State University President’s Office recently held receptions for this year’s round of inaugural lectures. Three recently promoted faculty in the College of Humanities and Social Sciences presented thoughtful reflections on their research and the even...
