Teaching, Learning and Behavior

The Department of Religious Studies at the University of Kansas received a $60,000, two-year grant from the nonprofit group Interfaith America to create partnerships with community groups addressing the spiritual connection to health issues.

“Transforming College Teaching Evaluation,” a new book from scholars at the University of Kansas and colleague institutions, outlines a project that developed new ways to more fully evaluate the value of college teaching. The book details how three institutions developed a new, more robust method of evaluation that recognizes how to fully evaluate teaching and how schools can overcome resistance to implement the methods at their campuses.

A study from the University of Kansas and University of Southern California measured which nonverbal behaviors indicate that people are forming connections in a support group, particularly in virtual groups. The researchers also examined the feasibility of using machine learning in support groups.

The University of Kansas is part of the Collaborative Approaches to Impactful Special Education Leadership program, designed to enroll scholars with teaching experience who want to progress to leadership roles in research, teaching and serving students with disabilities.

Continued funding for this work will "ensure that all of our shareholders, whether that be state-level personnel, local-level personnel, and/or students and youth with disabilities and their families, can really digest the work,” according to the primary investigator, Valerie Mazzotti, who is an affiliated researcher at the KU Center on Disabilities and KU distinguished professor of special education.

Researchers in the University of Kansas School of Social Welfare have secured a grant to implement the Family Opportunity, Resilience, Grit, Engagement (FORGE) partnership in five northeast Kansas counties to promote healthy relationships, engaged fatherhood and family and financial stability.

In a new book chapter, Thomas Tuozzo, professor of philosophy at the University of Kansas, examines the various viewpoints from Plato’s “Symposium” that address the question: What attracts us when we fall in love?

A new study from University of Kansas researcher Jeffrey Hall finds young adults vacillate between feelings of loneliness and connection as they establish themselves. The researcher also found evidence to push back on depressing narratives.

In a new study, University of Kansas researchers find an untapped area within the study of metadiscourse, aka “words used to organize a text.” The KU scholars reveal several problematic issues when implementing the two influential models of metadiscourse into the genre of written feedback. The findings were published in Research Methods in Applied Linguistics.

A research tool measuring how infants build communication skills into spoken language has been used for first time to study children with neurodivergent conditions. The new work by University of Kansas researcher Nancy Brady has been published in the Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research.