ASU Scholarship Showcase

We recommend using backward design to develop course-based undergraduate research experiences (CUREs). The defining hallmark of CUREs is that students in a formal lab course explore research questions with unknown answers that are broadly relevant outside the course. Because CUREs lead to novel research findings, they represent a unique course design challenge, as the dual nature of these courses requires course designers to consider two distinct, but complementary, sets of goals for the CURE: 1) scientific discovery milestones (i.e., research goals) and 2) student learning in cognitive, psychomotor, and affective domains (i.e., pedagogical goals). As more undergraduate laboratory courses are re-imagined as CUREs, how do we thoughtfully design these courses to effectively meet both sets of goals? In this Perspectives article, we explore this question and outline recommendations for using backward design in CURE development.

This article develops a welfare theoretic framework for interpreting evidence on the impacts of public programs on housing markets. We extend Rosen's hedonic model to explain how housing prices capitalize exogenous shocks to public goods and externalities. The model predicts that trading between heterogeneous buyers and sellers will drive a wedge between these “capitalization effects” and welfare changes. We test this hypothesis in the context of changes in measures of school quality in five metropolitan areas. Results from boundary discontinuity designs suggest that capitalization effects understate parents’ willingness to pay for public school improvements by as much as 75%.

The number and variety of connectivity estimation methods is likely to continue to grow over the coming decade. Comparisons between methods are necessary to prune this growth to only the most accurate and robust methods. However, the nature of connectivity is elusive with different methods potentially attempting to identify different aspects of connectivity. Commonalities of connectivity definitions across methods upon which base direct comparisons can be difficult to derive. Here, we explicitly define “effective connectivity” using a common set of observation and state equations that are appropriate for three connectivity methods: dynamic causal modeling (DCM), multivariate autoregressive modeling (MAR), and switching linear dynamic systems for fMRI (sLDSf). In addition while deriving this set, we show how many other popular functional and effective connectivity methods are actually simplifications of these equations. We discuss implications of these connections for the practice of using one method to simulate data for another method. After mathematically connecting the three effective connectivity methods, simulated fMRI data with varying numbers of regions and task conditions is generated from the common equation. This simulated data explicitly contains the type of the connectivity that the three models were intended to identify. Each method is applied to the simulated data sets and the accuracy of parameter identification is analyzed. All methods perform above chance levels at identifying correct connectivity parameters. The sLDSf method was superior in parameter estimation accuracy to both DCM and MAR for all types of comparisons.

Increasing levels of financial inequality prompt questions about the relationship between income and well-being. Using a twins sample from the Survey of Midlife Development in the U. S. and controlling for personality as core self-evaluations (CSE), we found that men, but not women, had higher subjective financial well-being (SFWB) when they had higher incomes. This relationship was due to ‘unshared environmental’ factors rather than genes, suggesting that the effect of income on SFWB is driven by unique experiences among men. Further, for women and men, we found that CSE influenced income and SFWB, and that both genetic and environmental factors explained this relationship. Given the relatively small and male-specific relationship between income and SFWB, and the determination of both income and SFWB by personality, we propose that policy makers focus on malleable factors beyond merely income in order to increase SFWB, including financial education and building self-regulatory capacity.

The debate about representation in the brain and the nature of the cognitive system has been going on for decades now. This paper examines the neurophysiological evidence, primarily from single cell recordings, to get a better perspective on both the issues. After an initial review of some basic concepts, the paper reviews the data from single cell recordings – in cortical columns and of category-selective and multisensory neurons. In neuroscience, columns in the neocortex (cortical columns) are understood to be a basic functional/computational unit. The paper reviews the fundamental discoveries about the columnar organization and finds that it reveals a massively parallel search mechanism. This columnar organization could be the most extensive neurophysiological evidence for the widespread use of localist representation in the brain. The paper also reviews studies of category-selective cells. The evidence for category-selective cells reveals that localist representation is also used to encode complex abstract concepts at the highest levels of processing in the brain. A third major issue is the nature of the cognitive system in the brain and whether there is a form that is purely abstract and encoded by single cells. To provide evidence for a single-cell based purely abstract cognitive system, the paper reviews some of the findings related to multisensory cells. It appears that there is widespread usage of multisensory cells in the brain in the same areas where sensory processing takes place. Plus there is evidence for abstract modality invariant cells at higher levels of cortical processing. Overall, that reveals the existence of a purely abstract cognitive system in the brain. The paper also argues that since there is no evidence for dense distributed representation and since sparse representation is actually used to encode memories, there is actually no evidence for distributed representation in the brain. Overall, it appears that, at an abstract level, the brain is a massively parallel, distributed computing system that is symbolic. The paper also explains how grounded cognition and other theories of the brain are fully compatible with localist representation and a purely abstract cognitive system.

Women who start college in one of the natural or physical sciences leave in greater proportions than their male peers. The reasons for this difference are complex, and one possible contributing factor is the social environment women experience in the classroom. Using social network analysis, we explore how gender influences the confidence that college-level biology students have in each other’s mastery of biology. Results reveal that males are more likely than females to be named by peers as being knowledgeable about the course content. This effect increases as the term progresses, and persists even after controlling for class performance and outspokenness. The bias in nominations is specifically due to males over-nominating their male peers relative to their performance. The over-nomination of male peers is commensurate with an overestimation of male grades by 0.57 points on a 4 point grade scale, indicating a strong male bias among males when assessing their classmates. Females, in contrast, nominated equitably based on student performance rather than gender, suggesting they lacked gender biases in filling out these surveys. These trends persist across eleven surveys taken in three different iterations of the same Biology course. In every class, the most renowned students are always male. This favoring of males by peers could influence student self-confidence, and thus persistence in this STEM discipline.

This paper studies an infinite-horizon repeated moral hazard problem where a single principal employs several agents. We assume that the principal cannot observe the agents' effort choices; however, agents can observe each other and can be contractually required to make observation reports to the principal. Observation reports, if truthful, can serve as a monitoring instrument to discipline the agents. However, reports are cheap talk so that it is also possible for agents to collude, i.e., where they shirk, earn rents, and report otherwise to the principal. The main result of the paper constructs a class of collusion-proof contracts with two properties. First, equilibrium payoffs to both the principal and the agents approach their first-best benchmarks as the discount factor tends to unity. These payoff bounds apply to all subgame perfect equilibria in the game induced by the contract. Second, while equilibria themselves depend on the discount factor, the contract that induces these equilibria is independent of the discount factor.

This paper traces the history of mortgage law in the United States. I explore the history of foreclosure procedures, redemption periods, restrictions on deficiency judgments, and foreclosure moratoria. The historical record shows that the most enduring aspects of mortgage law stem from case law rather than statute. In particular, the ability of creditors to foreclose nonjudicially is determined very early in states’ histories, usually before the Civil War, and usually in case law. In contrast, the aspects of mortgage law developed through statute change more frequently. This finding calls into question whether common law is inherently more flexible than the civil-law system used in some other countries. However, case law tends to be less responsive to populist pressures than statutes. My findings suggest that the reason common law favors financial development is unlikely to be its greater flexibility relative to law made by statute.

Persistent economic pressures in today's business landscape require organizations to be constantly vigilant about managing costs. Reducing headcount is one common but often controversial form of cost cutting. Recently Hewlett-Packard announced that it would be cutting an additional 11,000-16,000 jobs on top of an original plan to let as many as 34,000 workers go as part of a business restructuring and turnaround strategy. Chief Executive Officer (CEO) Meg Whitman said major shifts that are transforming how technology is paid for and consumed pose major challenges for HP, along with its competitors. To be successful in this new reality, she emphasized that HP needs to be lower-cost and more nimble. This is just one of a long list of examples of significant corporate workforce reductions in the face of mounting financial and competitive challenges faced by businesses across many industries.

As our discipline has matured, we have begun to develop theories of supply chain management. However, we submit that a major omission of theory development in the supply chain management discipline is that we have failed to develop a theory of what we are managing - a theory of the supply chain. Using a conceptual theory building approach, we introduce foundational premises about the structure and boundary of the supply chain, which can serve as the basis for much needed, additional development of the theory of the supply chain.