GSE in the News

Headlines from stories that featured our faculty and students

Delta Variant Keeps Expats Stranded as Countries Reinforce Border Controls

Jinting Wu, assistant professor of educational leadership and policy, was featured in a Wall Street Journal piece on how the Delta variant is impacting travel among expats. The story reports that travel restrictions are complicating Wu's hopes of bringing her son to China to meet his grandparents. Wu had planned to visit China in December to conduct research and see family, but she is worried the Delta outbreak will worsen by then and that travel restrictions will tighten. She said it is likely that she will have to delay her trip until May.

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Library grant promotes diversity at UB

Rep. Brian Higgins announced that UB has been awarded a $478,044 grant by the Institute of Museum & Library Services and funded through the Laura Bush 21st Century Librarian Program to investigate the retention of librarians who identify as Black, Indigenous, and people of color. “There are lots of initiatives focused on recruiting a diverse library workforce, but if the profession can’t retain BIPOC librarians who have already been recruited, then recruitment strategies will have a limited and temporary effect. So, discovering effective strategies for retention of BIPOC librarians is critical,” said Amy VanScoy, associate professor in the Department of Information Science, who is helping lead the project.

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Ohio State University Survey Finds Student Anxiety, Depression, and Burnout On the Rise

An Ohio State University survey found that student anxiety, depression and burnout are on the rise. The article quotes Amy Reynolds, a professor in the Department of Counseling, School and Educational Psychology. “Mental health is an unattended-to issue in many places until there’s a crisis like a suicide,” said Reynolds. She added: “Students who had mental health challenges before the pandemic struggled more. And those who didn’t have a history struggled for the first time because of COVID. The stress and isolation in the pandemic and the racial reckoning amplified mental health concerns in some students and generated them in others. There is not a uniform one-size-fits-all as to what made this year so difficult.”

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Impulsiveness Is Tied to Faster Eating in Children, Study Finds

UB research co-led by Alyssa Button, a doctoral candidate in the Graduate School of Education, found a link between a child’s temperament and their eating behavior, including that impulsivity is tied to faster eating in children, a behavior that is also connected to childhood obesity. “[Fast eating is] actually a big predictor of later obesity,” says co-author Myles Faith, professor and chair of the Department of Counseling, School and Educational Psychology. “But we’ve not really known why kids differ in eating speed. So the fact that... temperament has some relationship with this really predictive trait was really interesting.”

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Suicide Among Black Girls Is a Mental Health Crisis Hiding in Plain Sight

Time magazine was among the news outlets reporting on the increase in suicides among Black girls, characterizing it as “a mental health crisis hiding in plain sight” in a story that quoted Amanda Nickerson, director of the Alberti Center for Bullying Abuse Prevention.

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Screen Free Week: How families can be mindful of time spent online

As someone who has been looking into how digital technologies can influence education, Sam Abramovich, associate professor of learning and instruction, and of information science believes screen free week can be more than just turning off a screen, WBFO reports. He thinks families can use this as an opportunity to take the passions kids have online, offline. He explained that by learning from what kids enjoy online, we can find ways to bring it offline, such as a love for Minecraft can also become a love for Legos. All you have to do is listen.

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Covid is taking its toll—academically, socially, emotionally—on kids

A report on WGRZ, also published in Business First, on the toll the pandemic has taken on students quotes Stephanie Fredrick, associate director of the Alberti Center for Bullying Abuse Prevention. Fredrick said while it’s too soon to know what the long-term effects will be, the pandemic is affecting kids’ social and emotional health in multiple ways, from depression to anxiety to isolation. “Bouts of remote learning meant many students didn't see their peers in-person,” Fredrick said, according to the article. “They also might not have seen relatives outside immediate family, not have interacted with friends outside school as often and missed out on typical high school traditions such as homecoming, prom and graduation.”

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Key to landing a job after college? Internships, study abroad, undergrad research and more

Phys.org, 7th Space and other websites report on a Graduate School of Education study which found that college students who engaged in four or more high-impact practices such as study abroad or internships have a 70% chance of either enrolling in graduate school or finding a full-time job after graduating with a bachelor’s degree. "Disadvantaged students are often neglected and stereotyped as not being capable of obtaining success when it is the environments that are at fault," says lead investigator Jaekyung Lee, professor of counseling, school and educational psychology.  

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Culture and Consciousness: Celebrating AAPI heritage at UB in the wake of #EndAsianHate

UB has been celebrating National Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month. The article quotes Namsook Kim, professor of educational leadership and policy. “Seeing what was happening in the world, in particular, the rise in hate against Asians and Asian Americans, we committed to meet as affinity groups to reassess our racial identity,” Kim said.

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The debate over student loan forgiveness and why it's not the only option to solve a debt crisis

Nathan Daun-Barnett, associate professor of higher education was featured in a story about student debt forgiveness. "To me personally student loans are a double-edged sword. They've made college accessible for some, but they've limited opportunities beyond college for others," said Daun-Barnett. “I don't think talking about student loan forgiveness as a stimulus is the right way to deal with this and it doesn't really deal with our underlying problem which is that many students are taking out more debt than they're prepared to manage," said Daun-Barnett.

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Raven Baxter's Discrimination At Work

Actress Jada Pinkett Smith’s Facebook talk show, Red Table Talk, featured doctoral student Raven Baxter on a segment about workplace discrimination. Baxter, who is Black, told a story about being aggressively interrogated on her first day of work by a co-worker because she “didn’t look like a scientist.” The co-worker didn’t believe that Baxter worked at the company and was moments away from calling law enforcement. Only after another white co-worker verified that Baxter was an employee of that company, did the instigator believe Baxter. In September 2020, Baxter was named as one of Fortune Magazines “40 Under 40” in emerging health care leaders.

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