The influence of having a black teacher can make a monumental difference in a black student’s life, and the effect begins early in an education. Having just one black teacher in elementary school not only makes children more like to graduate high school – it also makes them significantly more likely to enroll in college. Black students who’d had just one black teacher by third grade were 13 percent more likely to enroll in college – and those who’d had two were 32 percent more likely. The findings, from researchers at UConn, Johns Hopkins University, American University, and the University of California-Davis, were published recently in a working paper titled “The Long-Run Impacts of Same-Race Teachers” from the National Bureau of Economic Research. Another, related working paper by the same team titled “Teacher Expectations Matter,” also published today by NBER, found teachers’ beliefs about a student’s college potential can become self-fulfilling prophecies. Every 20 percent increase in a teacher’s expectations raised the actual chance of finishing college for white students by about 6 percent and 10 percent for black students. However, because black students had the strongest endorsements from black teachers, and black teachers are scarce, they have less chance to reap the benefit …

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While delving into the history of ethnic communities in Greater Hartford region, Fiona Vernal, an associate professor of history, discovered that the story of the state’s largest immigrant population had not yet been told. Connecticut’s largest immigrant population, according to the U.S. Census, is from the island nations of the West Indies in the Caribbean – a region that includes Cuba, Dominican Republic, the Bahamas, and Jamaica. Earlier this year Vernal developed a traveling exhibition on the history of the Hartford region’s West Indian community, which she will discuss as part of a lecture titled “How Did West Indians Become the Largest Foreign-Born Population in Connecticut?” tonight at 7 p.m. at the West Hartford Libraries. By 2017, nearly 487,000 immigrants had come to Connecticut from the West Indies since migration began in the 1940s during World War II. Guest workers arrived in America through bilateral labor agreements between British West Indian colonies and the United States, says Vernal, whose family origins are in Jamaica. They were men who replaced the thousands of Americans who left their jobs to fight in the war, some working in industry, but most in agriculture. The shade tobacco workers from the West Indies islands lived in camps at Bradley Field …

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Associate professor Rachel Tambling and doctoral candidate Thomas Bischoff, both of UConn’s Department of Human Development and Family Studies, recently completed a study that examines why clients terminate their work with therapists. The two will present their study at the National Council on Family Relations Conference in San Diego on Nov. 7-10. The data they used was from the Humphrey Clinic for Individual, Couples, and Family Therapy, which was located on the Storrs campus until it closed in August, after more than 30 years of existence. The two researchers discuss why this research is important and what else they are working on. Q. Why did you do this paper and what did you learn from it? RT: It fit into the bigger picture around the research of service utilization issues in counseling. One thing we know is that counseling benefits people for a variety of conditions, everything from weight management and smoking cessation to depression to parenting problems and child behavior. We know that therapy helps people, but very few people who are recommended to therapy actually enter into therapy, and of those who do, about half will drop out before the third session. So therapy is something that can really benefit people, but …

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On the fourth floor of Oak Hall, among the Department of Journalism’s classrooms and faculty offices, sits a little-known newsroom with a staff of five. What they lack in size they make up for in talent, work ethic, and a keen eye for the best news in Connecticut, which every week they deliver right to your inbox. Four journalism students and Associate Professor of Journalism Marie Shanahan aggregate news from around the state for their weekly publication, titled The Roundup, with the purpose of curating Connecticut news for a Connecticut audience. On Tuesdays and Thursdays at 11 a.m., journalism major and digital marketing and analytics minor Ryan Kim ’19 (CLAS), journalism and communication double major Brianny Aybar ’19 (CLAS), journalism and political science double major Gino DeAngelis ’20 (CLAS), and journalism and communications major Camila Vallejo ’19 (CLAS) generate the newsroom bustle that Shanahan says she misses from her days as a reporter at the Hartford Courant. “My class period is not your traditional class period,” she says. “We’re talking and we’re sharing, there’s side conversations going on and people online finding stories, looking at Twitter, covering breaking news. Putting that all together, that energy--I’m glad to have it.” The Roundup, which celebrated its first anniversary this September, has more than 400 subscribers, including students, alumni, journalists, and members of the public. The newsletter features 10 need-to-know news summaries for each week, followed by headlines the team thinks are must-reads and an original interview with a local journalist. Vallejo said she enjoys the departure from a traditional class, which gives her a chance to flex the editing, analysis, and technical skills she has learned …

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Two novel drugs kickstart motivation in rats suffering from apathy and a lack of oomph, UConn researchers reported at the Society for Neuroscience conference in San Diego on Nov. 5. Apathy steals the excitement from life. It’s a feeling of being fatigued, uninterested, and emotionally flat. People who suffer from apathy find it hard to exert effort, and life can seem tremendously difficult. One of the primary symptoms of depression, it’s also a side effect of certain medications. It can also be caused by inflammation from an infection or chronic disease such as multiple sclerosis. Apathy and lack of motivation are hard to treat. Many medications that help with other symptoms of depression don’t help much with them. But now, UConn behavioral neuroscientist John Salamone and graduate student Renee Rotolo have found that two new drugs can restore normal behavior in rats who lack motivation, pointing the way to potential treatments. This image shows two brain cells (pale yellow) and the open space between them, called a synapse. The blue circles are dopamine, a chemical that excites brain cells when it fills the synapse. Some drugs block the supply of dopamine to the synapse (the red X) and this can cause fatigue, lack …

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The midterm elections featured an electorate that is polarized and unhappy, with the economy not playing as important a role as it usually does. Health care and immigration were the key issues, along with President Donald Trump, and although there were national issues, regional predispositions played their usual important roles. Those were a few of the takeaways from a forum yesterday at UConn, held less than 24 hours after the House of Representatives returned to Democratic control, the Senate remained with the Republicans, and here in Connecticut, Democrat Ned Lamont was elected governor. Trump clearly was in the minds of voters around the country – no matter what their feelings about him are, said a panel of UConn political scientists. Early exit polling suggested that about two-thirds of the voters said their vote was about the president, according to Jennifer Dineen, associate professor of public policy and director of the graduate program in survey research. “More of those voters said they came to show opposition rather than support for the president,” Dineen said. “Last time I checked, nearly 4 in 10 voters said their vote was meant as a sign of opposition to President Trump.” The presence of Trump made this election more nationalized than those …

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The fragmentation of tropical forests weakens the effects of the “natural enemies” of some tree species, reducing their ability to maintain biodiversity, a new study published in Nature Communications found. When humans cut contiguous tropical forests into smaller fragments, ecologists say, forests along the edges of those fragments tend to experience a number of changes (e.g., higher temperatures, lower humidity), collectively known as “edge effects.” One such edge effect is a decline in tree species diversity. What causes this effect, however, has never been fully understood. The study by an international team of researchers from the University of Connecticut, Yale University, the National Center for Biological Science in Bangalore, India, and the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute, finds that the answer may lie in the complex and cryptic relationship between trees and their so-called “natural enemies.” The team demonstrates that fragmentation weakens the impact of some fungal pathogens and insect herbivores – specifically those specialized enemies that help maintain diversity in a tropical system – enabling some tree species to thrive near the forest edges in ways that they could not deeper in the forest. “Despite the large body of work on edge effects in fragmented forests, barely any studies had actually shown the mechanisms that decrease tree …

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Low voter turnout is a major factor in American elections. People think their votes don’t matter. They don’t like the candidates. They are turned off by negative campaigns. Tanya Rhodes Smith ’88 (CLAS), ’00 MSW, director of the Nancy A. Humphreys Institute for Political Social Work at UConn’s School of Social Work, responds: “There is a widespread narrative that your vote won’t make a difference. But elected officials pay attention to people and communities that vote. When people stay home, so does their power. And that has consequences.” Smith graduated from UConn’s College of Liberal Arts and Sciences in 1988 and the School of Social Work in 2000. For almost a decade, she worked in the private sector as a corporate benefits consultant, but she volunteered on the weekends with an organization that provided food, clothing, and emergency grants. “I saw how one emergency can send a family into long-term crisis,” she says. “I wanted to understand the root causes and solutions to poverty.” As a graduate student, she served as an intern at the Humphreys Institute, under founder Nancy A. Humphreys. After years of advocacy work in the Bridgeport area, Smith became the Institute’s next director in 2014, when Humphreys retired. “I jumped at …

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Trees are an everyday part of campus life at UConn. They help measure the passing of time from fall to winter to spring, provide the campus with shade and places of reflection, and add to the health of the environment. For many of those who pass them by each day, the trees go unnoticed. For the UConn Arboretum Committee, the trees are sights of majestic glory that make the campus the beautiful environment that it is. The newest project by this committee, made up of university faculty, staff, and students, is the concept of class trees. The hope is that each graduating class will support the arboretum endowment fund and identify a tree tribute for their year. This effort kicked off on Tuesday, Oct. 23, as a fastigiate tulip tree was planted along Fairfield Way near Hall Dorm. The fastigiate tulip, a member of the Magnolia family, has an upright form, with large, bright green, smooth lobed leaves that appear in the spring time, turning to golden yellow in the fall. Its late spring flowers attract hummingbirds, and the seeds are eaten by both birds and small mammals. The class tree initiative is led by emeritus professors Greg Anderson, Distinguished Professor of Ecology and …

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Public opinion polls are a mainstay of news coverage, particularly during election years. Candidates, parties, journalists, and others are riveted by each new batch of results, poring over them for an inkling about what voters will decide in November. But Associate Professor of Public Policy, Jennifer Dineen, explains in an excerpt from the Oct. 17 edition of UConn 360 that polls shouldn’t be seen as offering glimpses into the future. Instead, polls measure public opinion on a range of questions at a particular moment in time: a snapshot rather than a crystal ball. With midterm elections only weeks away, Dineen offers advice for analyzing polls, and answers some common questions about how pollsters reach their conclusions. Listen to the full episode go to uconn.edu/uconn360-podcast.   _ By: Tom Breen | story courtesy of UConn Today

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