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SMU rises in Carnegie Foundation research classification to ‘high research activity’

The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching has raised SMU’s classification among institutions of higher education, reflecting dramatic growth in the University’s research activity since it was last measured in 2005.

SMU is now categorized as a research university with “high research activity,” a significant step up from its last assessment in 2005 as a doctoral/research university. The Carnegie Foundation assigns doctorate-granting institutions to categories based on a measure of research activity occurring at a particular period in time, basing these latest classifications on data from 2008-2009.

“SMU’s rise in the Carnegie classification system is further evidence of the growing quality and research productivity of our faculty. We are building a community of scholars asking and answering important research questions and making an impact on societal issues with their findings,” said SMU President R. Gerald Turner. “In addition to our dedication to outstanding teaching, SMU is becoming increasingly recognized as a vital resource for research in a variety of fields.”

Increased research activity in step with other SMU advances
“The designation of SMU as a ‘high research activity’ university by the Carnegie Foundation is an important step in SMU’s evolution as a strong national university,” said Paul Ludden, provost and vice president for academic affairs. “The faculty, staff, and students at SMU can be proud of this, particularly when paired with our rise in national rankings. The Carnegie Classification recognizes the tremendous efforts by the entire faculty at SMU to expand our research portfolio and address the many questions facing North Texas and the world. Recognition should go to Associate Vice President for Research James Quick and his office for their efforts to support the research activities of our faculty and staff.”

The foundation’s assessment of SMU’s increased research activity occurs as the University is making dramatic advances in other measures of academic progress: U.S. News and World Report magazine gave SMU its highest ranking ever for 2011, placing SMU 56th among 260 “best national universities” — up from 68th in 2010.

Additionally, SMU’s Cox School of Business is one of only a few schools in the nation to have all three of its MBA programs ranked among the top 15, according to Bloomberg Businessweek. Applications to SMU continue to rise, as have average SAT scores for admitted students.

Carnegie finds SMU research activity recorded an increase
The Carnegie Foundation analyzed SMU’s research activity in a category of universities that awarded at least 20 research doctorates in 2008-2009, excluding professional degrees such as those leading to the practice of medicine and law. The analysis examined research and development expenditures in science and engineering as well as in non-science and non-engineering fields; science and engineering research staff (postdoctoral appointees and other non-faculty research staff with doctorates); doctoral conferrals in the humanities, in the social sciences, in STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) fields, and in other areas such as, business, education, public policy and social work.

The Carnegie Foundation classification of U.S. accredited colleges and universities uses nationally available data from the U.S. Office of Postsecondary Education, the National Center for Education Statistics’ Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS), the National Science Foundation, and the College Board.

“SMU’s rise in academic rankings and research productivity is a strong return on the investment of our alumni and other donors who provide support for research, endowed chairs, and graduate programs and fellowships,” said SMU Board of Trustees Chair Caren Prothro. “SMU students at all levels are the beneficiaries of this distinction as their faculty enliven the classroom with their research and engage students in the tradition of academic inquiry.”

About the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching
Founded by industrialist Andrew Carnegie in 1905 and chartered the following year by an Act of Congress, the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching is an independent policy and research center. Its current mission is to support needed transformations in American education. — Kim Cobb

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Mind & Brain

Study: Taboo prejudices can’t hide from psychological testing tool

People don’t like to admit if they are prejudiced, whether it’s against blacks or gays, women or Jews, or the elderly.

But researchers of social psychology have tests that can measure conscious or unconscious bias, and one of them is the “Implicit Association Test.” Developed in 1998, the test asks implicit questions — as opposed to explicit — to expose bias on socially sensitive topics. Worldwide, various IAT versions have been used in more than 1,000 studies over the years. The test’s most controversial finding has been that 70 percent of people tested for their racial attitudes unconsciously preferred white people to black people, but only 20 percent reported such an attitude.

What researchers hadn’t determined up until now is how reliable IATs have been at predicting behavior related to these taboo prejudices. Now they know.

Poehlman%2CAndrew.jpg In the first study of its kind, publishing in the “Journal of Personality and Social Psychology,” an SMU researcher and others validated the IAT’s ability to predict behavior around socially sensitive topics, particularly race. The study aggregated the findings of 184 different IAT research studies, which tested 14,900 subjects, and found the predictive validity of self-report measures was remarkably low, while incremental validity of IAT measures — how much it can predict behavior over-and-above explicit measures — was relatively high.

“Within behavioral research, we humans have attitudes and feelings and beliefs that we’re not willing or able to report on, or understand ourselves,” says T. Andrew Poehlman, one of the study’s four authors and an assistant professor at SMU. “This research shows that when you aggregate across many studies, it seems that non-conscious attitudes influence the way people behave in a systematic and important way. When you have attitude domains in which people are unable to accurately report on how they feel, then using a test like this can get around some of the touchier attitudes some subjects may have.”

Confirming the IAT’s predictive validity has ramifications for emerging interest in administering the IAT for applications in law, policy and business.

For example, one finding from IAT research is that most Americans associate men — more than women — with math. But most people won’t self-report that belief, either because they consider it unacceptable or they’re unaware of their bias. Also, IAT research has shown a majority of people prefer young people to old people, and white people to black people.

IAT presents concepts to subjects via computer and asks them to categorize them. Measuring the speed at which subjects respond, enables researchers to assess attitudes.

“The reality is, we hold a lot of these undesirable attitudes whether we like them or not,” says Poehlman in SMU’s Cox School of Business. “Since it’s impossible for people to empty the contents of their mental container onto the table — because most of what we’ve got in our brain is unconscious — the IAT has proven to be a good measure of attitudes, and we can use it as a predictor of how people will behave.”

Greenwald%2C%20Anthony%2007.JPG Lead author of the study was Anthony Greenwald, psychology professor and adjunct professor of marketing and international business at the University of Washington. Besides Poehlman, other authors are Eric Uhlmann, Northwestern University; and Mahzarin Banaji, Harvard University.

Greenwald created the IAT, then Banaji and Brian Nosek, a University of Virginia associate professor of psychology, developed it further.

More than 10 million versions of the test have been completed via the Internet site https://implicit.harvard.edu, as a self-administer demonstration, according to the University of Washington.

Anthony Greenwald

“In situations where people can easily report on their preferences because they are either willing or able, then explicit measures do a fine job,” Poehlman says. “But when we get to sticky things that people may not know they think, such as emerging preferences, racism, etc., or things that they know they think, but just don’t want to say, such as ‘women are bad at math,’ then the IAT is pretty useful.”

Studies reviewed for the analysis covered: black-white interracial behavior, non-racial intergroup behavior, gender and sexual orientation, consumer preference, political preference, personality differences, alcohol and drug use, close relationships and clinical phenomena.

Findings showed that:

  • Across all nine areas, measures of the test were useful in predicting social behavior.
  • For consumer and political preferences, both measures effectively predicted behavior, but self-reporting had significantly greater predictive value.
  • For samples with criterion measures involving black-white interracial behavior, predictive validity of IAT measures significantly exceeded that of self-report measures.

“The Implicit Association Test is controversial because many people believe that racial bias is largely a thing of the past,” Greenwald says.”The test’s finding of a widespread automatic form of race preference violates people’s image of tolerance and is hard for them to accept. When you are unaware of attitudes or stereotypes, they can unintentionally affect your behavior. Awareness can help to overcome this unwanted influence.” — Margaret Allen (University of Washington contributed to this report)

Related links:
Online: Take the Implicit Association Test
“Journal of Personality” draft in press: Predictive validity of the IAT
UW News: Study supports validity of test that indicates widespread unconscious bias
Sciencewatch.com: Anthony Greenwald talks about the Implicit Association Test
Anthony Greenwald
SMU Cox School of Business

Categories
Mind & Brain

Forget brainstorming, try brainwriting!

Given difficult business issues such as rapidly emerging technologies, shrinking budgets and growing global competition, generating creative solutions is imperative for organizations to survive and prosper.

However, the widely used process of brainstorming may not be nearly as effective as a technique called brainwriting, says Peter Heslin, an assistant professor of Management and Organization in SMU’s Cox School of Business.

peter-heslin.ashx.jpeg

“The most widely adopted process for generating creative ideas within organizations is brainstorming,” said Heslin, who won the 2006 C. Jackson Grayson Endowed Faculty Innovation Award for excellence and creativity in teaching.

“Despite its immense popularity, when groups of people interact for the purpose of brainstorming, they significantly over-estimate their productivity and produce fewer unique ideas than nominal groups of people generating ideas alone.”

“When the stakes are high, group process innovations that enable even modest increases in the quality of ideas available for consideration could be of immense practical value,” Heslin says in an upcoming paper for the “Journal of Occupational and Organizational Psychology.”

Heslin says that a key challenge for managers and scholars is identifying how groups can be more productive in generating ideas.

In contrast to the oral sharing of ideas in groups during brainstorming, brainwriting involves a group of people silently writing and sharing their written ideas. Research has revealed that brainwriting yields superior idea generation than either non-sharing or nominal groups. Groups that contain people with diverse but overlapping knowledge and skills tend to be particularly creative, he says.

Related links:
Peter Heslin faculty page
Peter Heslin home page
Executive Summary: In need of new ideas? Try brainwriting
Cox School of Business

Categories
Economics & Statistics Researcher news

Financial-market research nets Venkataraman cash prize

kvenkataraman.jpgKumar Venkataraman, in SMU’s Cox School of Business, has received an SMU 2008 Ford Research Fellowship.

Venkataraman’s research has influenced important policy debates on the structure of financial markets and has been cited by regulators with the Securities and Exchange Commission in the United States, as well as with the Financial Services Authority in Europe.

He specializes in market microstructure dynamics and applying sophisticated models to large databases of financial variables.

An associate professor in finance, Venkataraman’s work has been featured in industry publications such as “The CFA Digest.” It’s also been published in several books, including “The Handbook of World Stock, Derivatives and Commodities Exchanges.”

Venkataraman has published articles in “The Review of Accounting Studies,” “The Journal of Financial Economics,” and “The Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis.” He is an invited member of the National Bureau of Economic Research Working Group on Market Microstructure.

Established in 2002 through a $1 million pledge from Gerald Ford, chair of SMU’s Board of Trustees, the fellowships help the University retain and reward outstanding scholars. Each recipient receives a cash prize for research support during the year. The new Ford Fellows were honored by the SMU Board of Trustees at its May meeting.

Related links:
Kumar Venkataraman
2008 Ford Research Fellows named