Education Week (Clewiston Challenger pens an original commentary about school counseling and college readiness)
What’s Missing in Efforts to Curb Heavy Drinking, Hazing on Campuses
Editor’s Note: The following op-ed, authored by visiting assistant professor Adam McCready, was originally published in The Conversation and republished in UConn Today.
Maxwell Gruver had been a student at Louisiana State University for only a few weeks in 2017 before he died of alcohol poisoning in a fraternity house hazing ritual known as “Bible study.” He and other pledges were made to chug 190-proof alcohol called Diesel for not knowing how to recite the Greek alphabet or certain facts about the Phi Delta Theta fraternity.
Phi Delta Theta was ultimately banned from LSU, joining a list of several other fraternities banned at the school over the past few decades after hazing incidents. These incidents include the 1997 death of Ben Wynne, who died after a night of heavy drinking with fraternity brothers on a pledge night.
In October 2019, officials at Ohio University suspended all 15 fraternities on campus after allegations that at least seven of them were involved in hazing.
Fraternity initiations provide a rite of passage into manhood for some college men. Some young men engage in risky behaviors such as drinking in excess to prove their manhood and gain acceptance from other men.
Hazing and heavy drinking have been taking place at American colleges and universities for decades. Death has been a constant companion. New fraternity members at U.S. colleges and universities have died at an average rate of one per year for the past 50 years. Ten have died in the past three years. At least six hazing deaths since 2017 were alcohol-related.
Drinking and hazing on campus have led to lawsuits, criminal charges, and stricter hazing laws. However, an analysis of much of the research on these punitive measures shows they have done little to change the behavior of fraternity men.
As a researcher who has examined masculinity in college fraternities, I conclude that the reason these efforts have not succeeded is because they fail to deal with the fact that drinking alcohol – and other risky behaviors – are deeply embedded in society’s notions about what it means to be a man.
Risky rites of passage
Fraternity initiations provide a rite of passage into manhood for some college men. Some young men engage in risky behaviors such as drinking in excess to prove their manhood and gain acceptance from other men.
Numerous studies have found that commonly-held ideas associated with masculinity, such as risk-taking, competition and violence – things sometimes espoused by fraternities – are linked to worrisome behavior and beliefs. This may also include getting drunk and the viewing of women as lesser “objects.”
Historically white college fraternities, which have helped define manhood on campuses for almost two centuries, help shape college drinking culture. Members of fraternities have been found to binge drink more than peers who don’t belong to fraternities, and privileged fraternity men have been found to drink more than their less privileged peers.
This leads me to the conclusion that attacking the problem of drinking necessitates dismantling the idea that drinking is part of what makes one a man.
Fraternally drinking
My own research used a survey to collect data from over 2,500 members of a fraternity with chapters at more than 70 U.S. colleges and universities. I found that members were more likely to drink at fraternity chapters with homophobic cultures.
This finding indicates fraternity men drink at least in part to prove they are not gay, and thus are real men, when they are with peers who want to be identified as heterosexual. Of course, this is just one of many reasons why young men drink.
As other scholars have found, alcohol use affords fraternity men the chance to engage in behaviors perceived to be feminine, such as showing emotion or developing relationships with other men, without having their manhood called into question. Alcohol use, in my view, provides fraternity men with a way to prove their masculinity and at the same time escape it.
Rethinking manhood
What does this mean for those who hope to address problematic behaviors, such as excessive alcohol use on campus?
First, addressing how fraternities view manhood may be an effective way to get individual members to behave more responsibly. Whether dealing with fraternities as a whole or individual members, interventions, such as campaigns to set new social norms, should aim to reduce fear and anxieties that prevent men from being themselves, particularly around their sexual identity. Efforts should be made to challenge what it means to be a fraternity man.
Research indicates that marketing campaigns targeted toward men can change their attitudes and behaviors about sexual violence. Like the 2014 NO MORE campaign against domestic violence and sexual assault that featured prominent NFL players, campus leaders could design campaigns that feature fraternity men denouncing homophobia and misogyny.
Like other programs that help college men explore manhood, forums could be convened to help fraternity men develop meaningful, deep relationships with one another without alcohol, or having their manhood called into question. These forums may strengthen relationships among fraternity men and reduce their alcohol use.
Since my study shows that drinking and ideas about manhood vary from one fraternity to another, “one size fits all” approaches – such as community-wide fraternity bans and prohibitions – are unlikely to change the behaviors of fraternity men. In my view, it will require individual or organization-specific interventions. That, it seems to me, will be more likely to curb problematic alcohol use before another death, injury or sexual assault occurs.
Here’s What’s Missing in Efforts to Curb Heavy Drinking and Hazing on Campus
The Conversation (Adam McCready writes an original commentary on masculinity and drinking problems in college fraternities)
Only One Woman on a List of America’s Most Innovative Leaders? Really?
Hartford Courant (Gina Barreca and Sally Reis on innovative leaders and creativity in America)
Neag School Holds Annual Scholarship Awards Celebration
The Neag School community honored more than 150 Neag School student scholarship recipients last month at the School’s Annual Scholarship Awards Celebration, many of whom attended the celebratory luncheon in Rome Commons Ballroom with their family and friends. The student attendees had the unique opportunity to cultivate relationships with the donors whose support plays an integral part in their educational pursuits.
The scholarships are made possible by the generosity of Neag School and UConn alumni, faculty, and administrators as well as others beyond the University who are committed to helping students through their higher education journey.
The event was emceed by three-time Neag School alumnus Desi Nesmith ’01 (ED), ’02 MA, ’09 6th Year, current chief turnaround officer for the state of Connecticut, who shared his story of being the beneficiary of scholarships while at the Neag School and who now gives back to the School as a donor. Nesmith, who previously received the Neag School’s Outstanding Early Career Professional Award, has also supported the School as a past member and president of its Alumni Board.
“You don’t have to wait to give. It’s not the amount; it’s the passion, and it’s getting engaged with the University and staying engaged.”
— Sandra Hastings ’89 MA, ’94 Ph.D.
“For the students, people have made an investment in you and the best way that you can pay that forward as you begin to step into your career is not forget that,” says Desi Nesmith. “Because of folks like the donors in the room, they paid it forward for people like me. So it’s a pleasure for my wife and I to be donors and to be able to pay it forward for you because it's you who are shaping the next generation.”
The event also featured remarks from scholarship recipient Isabella “Ivy” Horan ’19 (ED), ’20 MA, a current Neag School master’s student in elementary education, who shared the top 10 things her students have taught her in her teaching experiences thus far. Among the lessons she shared were the importance of building positive relationships with students, having fun, and being yourself in the classroom.
“For students like me who are preservice teachers, you are supporting not only us, but also bettering the lives of future generations of students who will have us as teachers, too,” Horan told the scholarship donors in attendance. Her remarks were subsequently republished in the Hartford Courant.
A performance by three music education students — Jamie Bailey ’21 (ED), ’22 MA, William Mandelbaum ’21 (ED), ’22 MA, and Emily VanRyswood, ’21 (ED), ’22 MA — featured a rendition of “I See Fire” by Ed Sheeran.
Their performance was preceded by a question-and-answer conversation between Nesmith and alumna Sandra Hastings ’89 MA, ’94 Ph.D., chair of the Neag School of Education Dean’s Board of Advocates.
Hastings shared her journey from serving as an expert in workforce development to becoming involved in philanthropy. Her ambition to launch a collaborative philanthropic effort led her to develop a $50,000 endowment this past year that supports study abroad opportunities for Neag School students, while also giving family and friends of hers the chance to contribute to the scholarship fund.
“By leaving the door open and giving people the opportunity to give as much or as little as they could, I was able to raise $50,000 pretty quickly,” says Hastings. “I think that even if it’s $5 a year, we all can give something.”
“You don’t have to wait to give,” she added. “It’s not the amount; it’s the passion, and it’s getting engaged with the University and staying engaged.”
Why Give?
The theme of the awards celebration was “planting seeds,” symbolizing the ways in which scholarships plant seeds for students’ futures and allowing them to flourish in their future careers.
“These are the people that are going to be teaching the future,” says Elizabeth Degnan ’87 (CLAS), a UConn alumna who founded the Degnan Family Scholarship along with her husband, James ’87 (CLAS). “The impact we are going to have on generations to come is an honor and a privilege.”
Carla Klein ’72 (ED), a UConn alumna, retired teacher, and emeritus UConn Foundation Board Member, who established an endowment for graduate students in teacher education with her late husband, John ’71 (CLAS), ’77 JD, says her desire to give back stems from seeing her husband struggle with paying his college debt.
“I saw the way that affected him, and if I could make it easier for other people, that’s my intent,” says Klein.
Neag School professor emeritus and UConn alumnus Francis X. Archambault says a lot had been given to him throughout his life, and he felt he had a personal responsibility to give back to the University.
“I worked at UConn for many years, and I’m passionate about UConn,” says Archambault. “I think it’s a great institution, and I’m just happy to be a part of it.”
For Irene P. Makiaris, the decision to give back to the Neag School is rooted in her appreciation for education, being born to immigrant parents and her father having only received a sixth-grade education.
“When he came to the United States, he said, ‘My children are going to be educated; that’s the No. 1 thing that I want them to do,’” says Makiaris. “I feel blessed that I had the opportunity to be able to get an education, and I had parents who really pushed me.” She and her husband, alum Emanual Makiaris ’65 (CLAS), established the Irene P. and Emanuel A. Makiaris Scholarship, which supports students in teacher education.
Numerous Neag School faculty also have actively supported student scholarships. Suzanne Wilson, head of the Department of Curriculum and Instruction and Neag Endowed Professor in Teacher Education, is currently putting her own endowed fellowship into place. She says she feels lucky to work in higher education at an institution that allows her to teach and conduct important research.
“It’s important to give back to the institutions that support you along the way,” says Wilson. “It contributes to the social glue of our country and connects us to other people, to other communities, and to the organizations and communities that nurture us.”
Learn more about supporting the Neag School of Education through scholarships for students.
View photos from the event.
Fresh Talk: 10 Lessons I Learned From My Students
Hartford Courant (Neag School graduate student Isabella Horan writes an original commentary about lessons she’s learned from teaching)
Why You Should Seek Help With Mental Health
The Daily Campus (Clewiston Challenger serves as expert for panel focused on student mental health)
Little Bit of Chaos’ and ‘Passion-Used Learning’ in Manhattan
AM New York (Joseph Renzulli is quoted about New York public schools’ controversy about eliminating gifted and talented programs)
Meet the Researcher: Devin Kearns, Education
Editor’s Note: This piece was originally published on UConn Today.
Devin Kearns began his career as a general education elementary school teacher for third-graders in Los Angeles, where he noticed many students had difficulty reading. The observation would lead to a dramatic shift in the trajectory of his work.
“After a couple years of really struggling to teach kids to read and working really hard and seeing kids not be successful, I decided there are a lot of things I must not be understanding about how to teach reading, so I started learning a lot more about that,” Kearns says.
Kearns first looked at reading strategies based in phonics, sounding out words and letter chunks. After seeing the dramatic progress students in a clinic for children with dyslexia were making using this approach, Kearns implemented the strategy in his own classroom, where he experienced the same kind of positive results.
“That made me really passionate about helping other educators provide high-quality beginning reading instruction to prevent dyslexia in kids or to help kids who are identified with dyslexia and other reading disabilities,” Kearns says.
“Professor Kearns’ ongoing work in the areas of special education and reading intervention, coupled with technologies like brain imaging, offers a fresh perspective into strategies that can ultimately help our schools successfully serve the needs of all students going forward.”
— Dean Gladis Kersaint
Kearns eventually moved from teaching in an elementary school to researching reading intervention at Vanderbilt University, where he earned his doctorate in special education. Now, as an associate professor of educational psychology in UConn’s Neag School of Education, he is taking his research into broader horizons and finding new applications for it.
‘What’s Going to Work Best With Kids’
Through a UConn Academic Plan grant, Kearns recently collaborated with Michael Coyne, professor of education, Jay Rueckl, associate professor of psychological sciences, and Ken Pugh, professor of psychological sciences, to determine the outcomes for two different educational strategies.
They tested a quick strategy against a longer, rule-driven approach to help children with difficulty reading.
Overall, the simpler strategy worked better than the rule-based one, they found. The more efficient approach consisted of asking kids to read syllables and then use them to sound out real and nonsense words. The rule-based strategy had children learn a rule about how to pronounce a certain set of letters and practice that rule many times.
After determining that the quicker strategy was more effective, Kearns and his team went on to investigate if it was more effective to study letter sounds or morphemes — units of meaning that make up a word.
Kearns was surprised that the morpheme strategy proved to be especially effective. “When I first left grad school, I didn’t really know much about morphemes,” Kearns says. “But, the data were clear: morphemes are important. So, I thought ‘I’m going to have to change direction,’ which is something in science that is very hard to do.
“It was like ‘OK, my theory didn’t pan out … but I’m just going to make the change because that’s what’s going to work best with kids.”
Some of Kearns’ other projects involve the classroom more directly. In a study that recently concluded, Kearns and Jade Wexler, associate professor of special education at the University of Maryland, worked with general and special education teachers in middle schools to find ways to co-teach more effectively.
“We want to make sure students with disabilities experience the same thing as other kids, but the data doesn’t show that it really works,” Kearns says. “Typically, there’s not much structure, and the special ed teacher ends up being more like a paraprofessional without a valuable role in the classroom.”
Kearns’ and Wexler’s program, which was implemented in 11 Connecticut classrooms, was successful. “The fact that we actually had better results in those classes is pretty remarkable and pretty exciting,” Kearns says.
Kearns is also creating a series of videos on explicit instruction, a way of teaching students learning disabilities using a highly structured format. He uses explicit instruction techniques in his research on reading intervention and has seen its effectiveness firsthand. Kearns and several of his colleagues have been creating free instructional videos in UConn’s Lightboard room as well as free workbooks for the National Center for Intensive Intervention’s website.
Understanding Reading From Inside the Brain
Recently, Kearns also began incorporating neuroimaging into his research to see what the change in the brain looks like when kids use different strategies. One project he is working on with Roeland Hancock, associate director of the Brain Imaging Research Center, involves transcranial direct current stimulation. This kind of treatment involves transmitting a very small electrical current to the brain while someone is participating in a traditional reading intervention.
Some studies have already shown that people read better if various parts of their brain are stimulated. However, there have been limited studies so far about the effectiveness of this treatment for reading in English. Kearns’ project hopes to help bridge this gap. The study will involve adults reading while their brains are stimulated in different areas related to reading skills like visual recognition or phonics.
While he is far from working to implement this kind of intervention in schools, this research provides valuable information about whether this stimulation helps and if so, which parts of the brain should be stimulated.
Gladis Kersaint, dean of the Neag School of Education, says that making research connections across disciplines is critical to advance learning.
“Professor Kearns’ ongoing work in the areas of special education and reading intervention, coupled with technologies like brain imaging, offers a fresh perspective into strategies that can ultimately help our schools successfully serve the needs of all students going forward,” Kersaint says.
Looking forward, Kearns expects his research to continue to utilize new technologies in dynamic ways. Artificial intelligence programs, he says, could help determine the best text to add to a child’s reading list or to listen to them read and analyze which sounds or syllable combinations are giving them the most trouble.
Kearns hopes to continue to work to understand cognition as it relates to reading and exploring and improving reading interventions for struggling young readers.
“All of these things I’ve done and will continue to do have the potential to make a difference in kids’ reading by giving them the most efficient, effective instruction we can possibly provide,” he says.
More Than $5M in Federal Funding to Support Gifted Education Research
Neag School educational psychology faculty have secured more than $5 million in federal funding through the U.S. Department of Education’s Jacob K. Javits Gifted and Talented Students Education Act for two new research projects centered on gifted education.
Advanced Math Instruction for Gifted Students
Launched on Oct. 1, Project Building Up Mathematics Proficiency Utilizing Push-In (Project BUMP UP) is led by principal investigator Del Siegle, Neag School professor and associate dean for research and faculty affairs. With $2.8 million in funding over five years, the Neag School will be working with partner researchers at the College of William and Mary to implement programming focused on advanced math instruction for more than 400 students in Grades 4 and 5 across 30 schools. Professors E. Jean Gubbins and D. Betsy McCoach are serving as co-principal investigators.
According to the researchers, the most popular model today for servicing gifted students is known as “pullout” programming; however, most of these programs do not provide advanced instruction in math. Project BUMP UP will look to supplement existing pullout programs with “push-in” programming that emphasizes advanced math instruction; three types of training will be provided to gifted specialists and classroom teachers.
The goal of the study is fourfold:
- to increase the identification of gifted students from underrepresented/underserved groups;
- to increase the math achievement of gifted students from underrepresented/underserved groups;
- to develop talents of high-achieving students not identified as gifted; and
- to improve student motivation and attitudes toward school and math.
“We are excited about this opportunity to test a new model for providing gifted education services,” says Siegle, who also serves as director of the National Center for Research on Gifted Education, which also is funded by the Javits program. “This research has the potential to involve more students from underserved populations and increase mathematics achievement.”
Supporting Academically Talented Students on the Autism Spectrum
In addition, UConn Board of Trustees Distinguished Professor and Letitia Neag Morgan Chair in Educational Psychology Sally Reis is serving as principal investigator on another Neag School research project funded by Javits. Project Twice Exceptional With Autism Spectrum Disorder (Project 2e-ASD), supported by a $2.6 million grant over five years, will focus on academically talented students with autism who are traditionally underserved in gifted programs.
“We need research to help these talented students, and to better inform their parents and teachers about how to help them develop their talents, and attend and complete college.”
— Sally Reis, Board of Trustees Distinguished Professor
Professor and Associate Dean for Academic Affairs Joseph Madaus is co-principal investigator. Two Neag School alumni are also co-investigators on the project: Nicholas Gelbar ’06 (CLAS), ’07 MA, ’11 MA, ’12 6th Year, ’13 Ph.D., an adjunct faculty member in educational psychology and special education; and Susan Baum ’85 Ph.D., Professor Emeritus for the College of New Rochelle in New Rochelle, N.Y., and the Neag School’s 2015 Outstanding Professional Award honoree.
When it comes to academically talented students with autism, or “twice-exceptional” students, the researchers assert that the field of gifted education has a very limited understanding not only about how these students are identified, but also how and if they succeed academically; whether or not they participate in gifted programs; and how successfully they transition to college.
“The idea for this grant emerged from the many questions we receive from parents and teachers of academically talented students who are on the autism spectrum,” says Reis. “They often ask: ‘What types of college programs will work best for my son and/or daughter or student with ASD?’ ‘Will he or she do better in a bigger college or smaller college?’ ‘Should they attend a community college program first?’ ‘What kinds of skills do they need to be successful in college?’ — and the honest answer is: We don’t know.”
Project 2e-ASD will examine how to identify — and teach — academically talented, high-ability high school students who are on the autism spectrum. Researchers will concentrate on the academic and learning strategies, personal skills, and enrichment strategies teachers and these students need to teach and learn to achieve academic success, with the goal of developing and disseminating various resources, including training materials and professional development modules.
With information lacking on how to advise parents and teachers about the skills needed or the types of high school programs to best prepare academically talented students with autism, Project 2e-ASD is particularly timely.
“We need research to help these talented students, and to better inform their parents and teachers about how to help them develop their talents, and attend and complete college,” says Reis. “That is what we hope to accomplish with this grant.”
