Shaping Major Choice: The Role of High School Counselors

 Existing studies show that high school counselors can significantly influence students' graduation rates and college enrollment; less is known about their ability to direct students toward particular fields of study. 

This study evaluates an information intervention aimed at increasing counselors' awareness of economics, a major often associated with misconceptions about its content and career opportunities, and characterized by substantial under-representation of women and racial and ethnic minorities. Counselors from randomly selected Texas high schools were invited to participate in a one-day information workshop on the economics major. 

The authors evaluate the impact of the intervention on students' major preferences and outcomes using application and admissions data from a large public university attended by many graduates from the treatment schools, as well as enrollment and course-taking records from the Texas Education Research Center. 

The intervention led to substantial increases in interest in economics at the college application stage, particularly among high-achieving women, but did not lead to significant changes in college major outcomes. 

The authors conclude that high school counselors can play an important role in shaping students' field-of-study preferences, but translating preferences into enrollment requires additional exposure and reinforcement.

An Informational Rationale for Viewpoint Neutrality in Education

 Consider a society that faces uncertainty about a payoff-relevant state and wants to train students to make correct decisions. In educational institutions, students learn from their teachers, but they also get outside information, and later learn from peers. 

In this study the authors show that privately Bayesian actions need not be optimal inputs into social learning: when students' actions reflect teacher-side information that is correlated across peers, observing many such actions can give this information excessive social weight. A social planner may therefore optimally reduce the precision of instruction, inducing students to rely more on outside information before their actions become signals for others, and students can end up better informed despite learning less from their teachers.

 The case for a precision cap is stronger when peer interaction is homophilous, because same-teacher information is more likely to survive aggregation, and weaker when outside information is itself systematically distorted. This provides an informational rationale for viewpoint neutrality as an institutional policy: it limits the social overrepresentation of correlated teacher-side information when students mostly learn from peers exposed to similar sources.

Air Pollution and Early Childhood Outcomes

 Many effects of pollution exposure on health and education outcomes of children have been identified, but little is known about education effects on preschool-aged children. 

This study estimates the effect of particulate matter air pollution on preschool attendance using restricted administrative data from the state of Georgia, using thermal inversions, weather phenomena that trap pollutants, as an instrumental variable for pollution. 

A one-unit increase in the county-week average ambient particulate pollution level decreases attendance by around 2 percentage points. Effects seem to be larger for racial minorities and for children with working parents.

What drives academic misconduct by professors and research students?

 

Ensuring the research that we all rely on – whether for our health, environment or economy – is trustworthy is important for universities, governments and business. Unfortunately, academic misconduct is a growing concern where researchers break the rules, such as making up results or copying others’ work making their research untrustworthy. 

An international study published in Higher Education Research & Development sheds light on the key factors that drive research misconduct in universities, offering crucial insights for strengthening research integrity worldwide.  

The study has found that academics believe that research misconduct is significantly more likely when penalties for misconduct are weaker, the likelihood of investigation is low, and the perceived harm caused by misconduct is minimal.  

At the lower end of the scale they believe misconduct is least influenced by how complex the research is, whether experts are involved, and whether researchers are exposed to formal training and policies.  

Lead author, University of Technology Sydney (UTS) Business Professor Paul Burke said this made preventing fabrication, falsification, plagiarism, or other questionable research practices primarily about addressing academic incentives, deterrence, and perceived consequences. 

The research was conducted by business and ethics researchers from UTS and the University of New South Wales and surveyed the views of more than 900 researchers across Australia, the United States and Europe. 

The study applied a discrete choice experiment to investigate research integrity, a method more commonly used in economics. Rather than asking researchers to rate factors individually, participants made trade-offs, revealing how they prioritise different drivers in real-world scenarios. 

“This approach gives us a much clearer picture of what actually matters in relative terms,” Professor Burke said. “It moves beyond simple checklists to understanding which different pressures matter more. 

“The findings highlight that researchers respond to the same kinds of incentives and disincentives we see in other decision-making contexts. When the risks are low and the consequences limited, misconduct becomes more likely. Education on misconduct matters but deterrence matters more.” 

Importantly, the study identifies three distinct groups of researchers, each with different perspectives on what drives misconduct.  

For experienced researchers, focus on penalties and the likelihood of investigation matters more. Early-career researchers are most influenced by observing the poor behaviours of senior academics. Mid-career STEM researchers emphasise peer pressure, mentoring, and perceived impact.  

“These differences matter,” Professor Burke said. “They show that a one-size-fits-all approach to research integrity is unlikely to be effective.” 

The findings point to several practical actions universities can take to promote research integrity including increasing transparency around misconduct investigations and outcomes; strengthening and consistently applying penalties for misconduct; creating safe, accessible pathways for reporting concerns; ensuring senior academics model ethical research behaviour; and tailoring integrity initiatives to different career stages and disciplines. 

The study also highlights broader cultural challenges in academia. While most researchers reported low personal engagement with misconduct, around one-third indicated they had experienced pressure to engage in questionable practices, and only just over half believed research integrity is strongly prioritised in their field. 

With public trust in science under increasing scrutiny, the study underscores the importance of strengthening research integrity systems globally.  

“Universities, funders and journals all have a role to play,” Professor Burke said. “Promoting integrity isn’t just about rules – it’s about creating environments where ethical research is the norm and supported at every level.”

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Journal

Higher Education Research & Development

DOI

10.1080/07294360.2026.2627872 

A student-led nonpartisan grassroots coalition to empower early-career science researchers

 A new Special Report in the journal BioScience introduces the Scientist Network for Advancing Policy (SNAP), a student-led nonpartisan grassroots coalition founded in 2025 to empower early-career researchers to engage with science policy, advocacy, and public communication. The report details the ways in which SNAP is reshaping the role of scientists in their communities.

SNAP emerged in response to a long-recognized gap: most academic training leaves scientists underprepared to navigate policy and civic discourse. As the authors write, "civic engagement is not an 'add-on' but a core part of scientific practice, particularly for early-career researchers."

The coalition's first major initiative, the McClintock Letters—named for Nobel laureate Barbara McClintock—encouraged scientists to write op-eds for their hometown newspapers about the value of federally funded research. Over 200 letters have been published across at least 45 states, Washington, DC, and Puerto Rico. A second initiative brought congressional advocacy to local district offices, lowering barriers to participation. Inspired by AIBS's annual Biological Sciences Congressional District Visits, SNAP coordinated 54 visits spanning 29 states, engaging both Democratic and Republican offices.

Continuing this momentum, SNAP is organizing Stance on Science, an initiative to track candidates’ science-related positions, along with an open-access Science Policy 101 curriculum and a Science Policy Hackathon.

The authors argue that lasting change requires institutional investment: "Universities and funding agencies must recognize civic engagement as a core competency and invest in long-term capacity-building." They further point out that, when scientists are equipped to engage, "they can strengthen democratic institutions, inform policy, and help ensure that science serves the public good."

The full article is available at https://doi.org/10.1093/biosci/biag053

Assessing social-emotional skills in youth—is a commonly used framework lacking?

A study in the PsyCh Journal uncovered numerous limitations when applying a popular framework for assessing social-emotional skills (such as empathy, persistence, and curiosity) to children and adolescents around the world.

Researchers assessed the framework (the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development’s Survey on Social and Emotional Skills) across 9 countries (US, Canada, China, South Korea, Finland, Colombia, Russia, Portugal, and Turkey). The adult-derived framework, which groups 15 skills into 5 categories aligned with the Big Five personality traits (openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and emotional stability), was not supported by data from more than 60,000 10- and 15-year-olds across 10 international cities.

The structure of skills changed with age and varied significantly by culture. A 10-year-old's “skill map” looked more like a blended mix, while a 15-year-old’s map showed more distinctions but was still not the same as the adult map the test was based on. Also, the pattern of skills looked different in different cities—from Houston to Helsinki to Suzhou—suggesting that local values, education systems, and social expectations influence which skills cluster together.

“Our findings challenge the assumption that a single, adult-based framework of social emotional skills works equally well for children and adolescents across different cultures,” said corresponding author Bo Ning, PhD, of Shanghai Normal University. “To measure these skills fairly and effectively, we need age-appropriate and culturally-sensitive approaches.”

URL upon publication: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/pchj.70108

New guide for AI in higher education

 With artificial intelligence tools available on every phone, laptop and tablet, higher education has struggled to implement consistent recommendations for how and when AI can be used. A new national guide seeks to change that.

"The Norton Guide to AI-Aware Teaching" (W.W. Norton and Co., 2026) will offer instructors strategies for teaching in the age of AI, whether the instructor hopes to embrace the technology, prohibit it or strike a balance in the classroom. The e-book will be available in July, and the hard copy will be published in September.

"This guide is for teachers to start really thinking about their values, learning outcomes and how AI can either complement or complicate those," said Marc Watkins, director of the Mississippi AI Institute for Teachers at the University of Mississippi and co-author of the book.

"That takes a lot of work and a lot of time. We're trying to make many different options available for faculty and to show different approaches that we've seen work at other universities, as well as what we're using at our university."

Watkins, who is also a lecturer in the Ole Miss Department of Writing and Rhetoric, wrote the guide alongside Annette Vee, associate professor of English at the University of Pittsburgh, and Derek Bruff, associate director of the University of Virginia's Center for Teaching Excellence.

The guide helps instructors handle the ubiquity of artificial intelligence, Vee said. A recent study in the journal Science found that approximately one-third of college students at major public universities are using AI on a regular basis, but only 9% have used it to cheat.

"Students are using this technology in a variety of ways, and it's not just cheating," Vee said. "They're using it to augment their reading, understand subjects better, plan study guides and structure their study habits. Students with disabilities are even using it for accessibility purposes."

Students can record lectures on their phones, use the built-in, AI-powered transcription system to turn those lectures into notes and use another AI to condense those notes into summaries, flash cards and slideshow presentations.

"Cheating is an issue, and we recognize that, but when we paint all (AI use) as cheating, it paints any student who uses it in a negative light," Vee said. "There are a lot of policies that are banning AI outright without an understanding of how students are using it and the ways that AI can be used productively."

Students, too, need guidance on when AI can improve learning and when it hampers it, Vee said.

"We use the word discernment in the book often," she said. "We have to help students discern when to use AI, when not to and how to evaluate those outputs.

"I think it's important for us – even if you're not teaching with AI – to make it clear you're not using AI in your classroom and tell students the reasons why. Because there are good reasons not to use it, but there are good reasons to use it, too."

Other faculty, seeing how common AI has become in certain jobs, feel pressured to help students learn to use the technology to prepare them for careers, Watkins said.

"The reaction you get from faculty is mixed, and for good reason," Watkins said. "A lot of faculty are upset by the fact that Silicon Valley has foisted this upon us, and they're concerned about students and the skill loss that can come with that.

"There's also a pressure to try to upskill students for the workforce and what role AI plays in their careers. We're not trying to be AI cheerleaders, but students do need to learn about AI, warts and all."

The book is neither meant to instruct faculty to use AI nor tell them not to use it, Watkins said. Instead, it offers a guide for deciding whether AI is right for a particular classroom and how to implement regulations that set expectations for students early.

"This technology is very powerful, but we need ground rules about disclosure and transparency when it's used, if it's used," he said. "We're trying to give them different pathways so if they want to use or refuse AI, here's what that might look like in your class and here's how to communicate that to your students.

"Regardless of whether you use it or to what extent you use it, there have to be ground rules in place. It's just not realistic to take your entire class up on academic misconduct charges when students don't understand the technology and instructors haven't asserted the guidelines."