Exploring the stability of the gender gap in faculty perceptions of gender climate at a rural regional university

Increasing awareness of gender barriers and biases in academic institutions is an essential component of institutional change strategies to promote equity and inclusion. There is an established perception gap in recognizing gender inequities in the workplace, whereby men faculty under acknowledge the stressors, barriers, and biases faced by their women faculty colleagues. This study explored the gender gap in faculty perceptions of institutional diversity climate at a rural comprehensive regional university in the United States. In addition to gender, differences across academic discipline and time were explored using 2 (men and women) x 2 (STEM and other) x 2 (2017 and 2022) between-groups ANOVAs. Results revealed a gender gap that persisted across time and perceptions of stressors, diversity climate, student behavior, leadership, and fairness in promotion/tenure procedures, with marginalized (women) faculty consistently reporting greater barriers/concern for women faculty relative to the perceptions of their men faculty colleagues. These findings are largely consistent with the extant literature and are discussed both with regard to future research directions and recommendations for reducing the perception gap and addressing institutional barriers to gender equity.

Use of Retroactive Pessimism as a Method of Coping with Identity Threat: The Impact of Group Identification

Retroactive pessimism involves retrospectively lowering one's evaluations of a group's chances for success after a failed competition. Although past research has substantiated the existence of this strategy, investigators have yet to examine how level of group identification might impact the use of retroactive pessimism. Given that coping with group threat is most prominent among persons with high levels of group identification, we hypothesized that displays of retroactive pessimism would be magnified in persons with strong allegiances to a group. This hypothesis was tested by having supporters of two college basketball teams evaluate the chances for victory for each team both prior to the game between the teams and subsequent to the contest. Regression analyses confirmed expectations (the greatest magnitude of retroactive pessimism was reported by highly identified supporters of the losing team in their evaluations of the winning team). Subsequent analyses revealed that this effect was not mediated by level of disappointment in the outcome.

Presentation Context and Perception of Causal Relatedness

In the present experiment, we investigated the extent to which the presentation context influenced the perception of the causal relatedness of sentence pairs. 60 participants were randomly assigned to one of two presentation conditions. Participants in the Blocked condition received sets of sentence pairs, with each set consisting of four possible causes for a given outcome. Participants in the Distributed condition received sets consisting of four unrelated outcomes each paired with a sentence describing a possible cause. Presentation condition had essentially no effect on the perception of causal relatedness.

Distinctiveness effects in recall: differential processing or privileged retrieval?

Unusual information is generally recalled better than common information (the distinctiveness effect). Differential processing accounts propose that the effect occurs because unusual material elicits encoding processes that are different from those elicited by common material, and strong versions of these accounts predict distinctiveness effects in between-list as well as within-list designs. Experiment 1 employed a between-list design and manipulated presentation rate. Contrary to differential processing predictions, no distinctiveness effect emerged, nor did recall patterns for atypical versus common sentences differ as a function of presentation rate. Experiment 2 further tested differential processing accounts as well as representation accounts via a within-list manipulation and conditions that included experimenter-provided elaborations. Distinctiveness effects emerged in all conditions and, contrary to differential processing predictions, the pattern of recall in the elaborated conditions did not differ from that in the unelaborated conditions. Taken together, the results of this study lend more support to a representation view that suggests mechanisms related to the representation and subsequent retrievability of elements in the memory record play a major role in the distinctiveness effect.

What makes folk tales unique: content familiarity, causal structure, scripts, or superstructures?

Requiring readers to re-order randomly ordered sentences into a coherent text significantly enhances recall relative to that in a read-only control condition for non-folk-tale texts but not for folk tales (Einstein, McDaniel, Owen, & Coté, 1990). Experiments 1-3 showed that embedding components of folk tales (e.g., causal structure, conventional scripts, content related to background knowledge) in non-folk-tale texts did not render sentence unscrambling ineffective for increasing recall. In Experiments 4a-4c, a folk tale was presented either as a fairy tale or as part of a newspaper article. Significant sentence unscrambling effects (in free recall) were not obtained in either presentation format, which implies that a story superstructure (a story grammar) does not contribute to the absence of the sentence unscrambling effect. It is suggested that understanding why the sentence unscrambling effect is absent for folk tales may require considering the functional role that narrative plays in socioculturally situated cognition.

What makes folk tales unique: content familiarity, causal structure, scripts, or superstructures?

Requiring readers to re-order randomly ordered sentences into a coherent text significantly enhances recall relative to that in a read-only control condition for non-folk-tale texts but not for folk tales (Einstein, McDaniel, Owen, & Coté, 1990). Experiments 1-3 showed that embedding components of folk tales (e.g., causal structure, conventional scripts, content related to background knowledge) in non-folk-tale texts did not render sentence unscrambling ineffective for increasing recall. In Experiments 4a-4c, a folk tale was presented either as a fairy tale or as part of a newspaper article. Significant sentence unscrambling effects (in free recall) were not obtained in either presentation format, which implies that a story superstructure (a story grammar) does not contribute to the absence of the sentence unscrambling effect. It is suggested that understanding why the sentence unscrambling effect is absent for folk tales may require considering the functional role that narrative plays in socioculturally situated cognition.

Pictorial enhancement of text memory: limitations imposed by picture type and comprehension skill

We examined the kinds of information in a prose passage that is better remembered when depictive illustrations are embedded in the passage than when the passage contains no illustrations. Experiment 1 showed that (1) pictures depicting details effectively increased recall of those details and (2) pictures depicting relationships effectively increased recall of that relational information (relative to a no-picture control condition). In Experiment 2, comprehension skill was found to modulate the general effects obtained in Experiment 1. Detail pictures enhanced the recall of targeted details for all skill levels. Relational pictures enhanced recall of pictured relational information for highly skilled and moderately skilled comprehenders, but not for less skilled comprehenders. Because there were no recall differences across the different skill levels in the no-picture control condition, it is suggested that pictures may serve to enable processing in which readers would not necessarily engage under ordinary circumstances. Pictures, however, did not appear to compensate for limitations reflected in lower scores on a standardized test of reading comprehension.

Generation effects in free recall: Further support for a three-factor theory

A framework is presented that helps explain and predict generation effects in free recall (for between-subjects manipulations of generating vs. reading). When the targets share common features and when that shared information is salient to subjects, subjects will exploit that information to help generate the target items. This produces more relational processing among the targets (relative to reading), enhancing free recall. Consistent with this idea, when shared information (among targets) was salient, generation effects in free recall were found under encoding conditions that can disrupt generation effects in cued recall (e.g., pairing targets with unrelated cues). Further, within the same list, generation effects emerged in free recall for targets that were processed after shared information became evident but not for targets processed prior to the availability of the shared information. In recognition, generation effects were found for targets regardless of when they were processed.