Amanda Chunco, associate professor of environmental studies, named CATL Scholar for the 2024-25 and 2025-2026 academic years.
The Center for the Advancement of Teaching and Learning has chosen a new CATL Scholar for the 2024-25 and 2025-26 academic years. Amanda Chunco, associate professor of environmental studies, will join more than 50 other CATL Scholars including current scholars Erin Pearson, Katie Baker, Chris Richardson and co-scholars Ketevan Kupatadze and Elena Schoonmaker-Gates.
The CATL Scholar program fosters innovative and scholarly teaching and learning. Echoing the Elon Teacher-Scholar statement, the CATL Scholars program is designed so that participants engage deeply with the shared goals of our academic community and develop highly innovative projects.
Chunco will work on “Grading and Belonging in STEM” for her CATL Scholar project, focusing on how faculty grading practices contribute to both student belonging and STEM identity. Her past work has shown that STEM faculty have a wide range of beliefs about grades (even within this single discipline) and that students have an equally wide range of feelings linked to around belonging and identity, with male students showing significantly lower belonging than female students.
Her scholars project will integrate both faculty and student experiences through a range of quantitative and qualitative data. Specifically, Dr. Chunco will examine: 1) the role identity and how belonging play in supporting students to complete a STEM major, 2) how STEM faculty assessment beliefs and practices contribute to student belonging and identity, and 3) whether grading practices have differential effects on students based on race, gender, and first-generation identities. Chunco aspires to broaden this work to evaluate student and faculty from a variety of STEM disciplines.
Chunco believes the results of the work will provide data around grading practices, especially following the COVID-19 pandemic and that this work could inform learner-centered pedagogies to support all students and potentially reduce the disparities between the students that feel that they can be successful in STEM and students who decide that they need to choose a different major.
A call for applications for CATL Scholars is announced early each fall. All full-time faculty are encouraged to apply. CATL Scholars are selected by a faculty committee comprised of other Scholars and CATL faculty advisory committee members.
Visit the CATL website or email CATL at catl@elon.edu for more information.