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Linked-course learning communities are a widely used strategy to promote connections between students and support student retention. This grant project created linked-course learning communities at Bridgewater State University, a public University in southeastern Massachusetts. The communities paired a central 3-credit seminar focused on one or more United Nations Sustainable Development Goal (UN SDG) with the student’s first science class and appropriate mathematics class. This choice was inspired by social psychology research literature showing that students traditionally underrepresented in STEM often value, and look for, the social relevance of science and benefit from structures that provide a more communal, as opposed to individualistic, orientation in their studies.
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The Reference Class Problem for Credit Valuation in Science
Scholars belong to multiple communities of credit simultaneously. When these communities disagree about a scholarly achievement’s credit assignment, this raises a puzzle for decision and game theoretic models of credit seeking in science. The reference class problem for credit valuation in science is the problem of determining to which of an agent’s communities—which reference class—credit determinations should be indexed for an act under some state of nature. Solving this problem requires developing rich, mutually informed theories of community and credit that are sensitive to the structure and status systems of complex, heterogeneous scholarly networks.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1759825
- PAR ID:
- 10254033
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Philosophy of science
- Volume:
- 87
- Issue:
- 5
- ISSN:
- 0031-8248
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 1026–1036
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
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- The DOI is not currently available.
