Members of the Lamm Lab traveled to Oklahoma City in February to participate in the Southern Region American Association for Agricultural Education conference. With the support of Dr. Alexa Lamm, members of the lab presented the following posters and papers about their current research projects.
Examining if the NSF INCLUDES Aspire Alliance Teaching Practicum Improved Community College STEM Teaching Among Underrepresented Graduate Mentees
Authors: Millicent Oyugi, Alexa J. Lamm, Elizabeth Litzler, and Jana Foxe
Dr. Millicent Oyugi presented a poster titled “Examining if the NSF INCLUDES Aspire Alliance Teaching Practicum improved community college STEM teaching among underrepresented graduate mentees.” The study examined the impact of a mentored teaching practicum on underrepresented graduate students’ community-college STEM teaching regarding career confidence, intent to apply the skills in future, and community-college teaching information sources. The community college teaching practicum enhanced the mentees’ career confidence and intent to use the teaching skills in future STEM classes. To learn more about the Aspire Alliance, click here.
Examining the Relationships Between Self-Efficacy and Information Sources among Agriscience Teachers in Texas
Authors: Millicent Oyugi, Alexa J. Lamm, and Catherine E. Sanders
Dr. Oyugi also presented a poster titled “Examining the relationships between self-efficacy and information sources among agri-science teachers in Texas.” The study examined the distributions of agriscience teaching self-efficacy scores regarding classroom management, student engagement, and classroom instruction; and relationships between agri-science teaching self-efficacy and Bandura’s (1997) four principal efficacy information sources. The results back up Bandura’s social cognitive theory, which postulates that mastery experience is the most impactful source of efficacy. Correspondingly, all types of agri-science teachers in Texas need to keep getting mastery experiences, like micro-teaching and teaching practicum, and verbal persuasion needs to be improved.
Using poetic dialogues to enhance community-based extension impact evaluation
Authors: Catherine E. Sanders, Alexa J. Lamm, Jori Hall, Abigail Borron, Maria Navarro, and James C. Anderson
Dr. Katie Sanders presented research from her dissertation project aimed at exploring new methods for communicating evaluation data. Sanders presented poetic research, narratives built from the words of focus group participants, to demonstrate the social and cultural impact of a community-based Extension project in rural Georgia. This line of research is an emerging one for Sanders, building off research published in 2022 in the International Journal of Qualitative Methodologies. To read more about Sanders’ work, click here.
Experiences of graduate students of color within colleges of agriculture at land-grant institutions
Authors: Aaron Golson, Catherine E. Sanders, and James C. Anderson
Lamm Lab member, Katie Sanders, also served as a co-author on a research paper presented by Aaron Golson about experiences of graduate students of color at land grant universities (LGUs).
This meeting was held in conjunction with the Southern Association of Agricultural Scientists annual meeting. To learn about additional Lamm Lab presentations held at this convergence of conferences, see our post on the Southern Rural Sociological Association and the National Agricultural Communications Symposium.
