Chapter 17- TikTok is Not Peer Reviewed: Modifying Assignments to Nurture Habits of Mind

During any given semester, my most engaged students send me materials related to what we are discussing in class. I always appreciate students’ excitement about the course content and the opportunity to experience different forums for conversation with my students. As the years have passed, however, more of the material students pass along comes in the form of YouTube videos. These videos will often star popular YouTube personalities who create content that has millions of views. Sometimes, the ideas the students pass along come in the form of short TikTok videos. This is all fine and even entertaining until this material starts to make its way into coursework. While I do not mind if the Internet sparks interest in my students, I would prefer that social media “influencers” do not shape the content of my student’s papers, since ideas presented in that medium are not subject to any sort of peer review or fact checking. This became a challenge with the final assignment at the end of each of my ethics courses. Students must grapple with a contemporary moral issue in the form of an argumentative paper. At first, I was quite flexible about the moral issue they selected. I encouraged them to pick a topic that was interesting to them. I have had students write on the kind of issues you might imagine in a course on ethics, such as abortion, euthanasia, or the death penalty. But I have also had students write on issues like the obligation states have to provide inclusive sex education that acknowledges that not all people are cisgender or heterosexual or our moral obligations to find alternate forms of energy in response to the threats posed by global climate change. For this freshman-level undergraduate course, the final version of the paper is five double-spaced pages long. I want the process to be meaningful for them; they use this as an opportunity to apply the knowledge they gained in the class. For years, however, it seemed that some of the students were not taking the assignment seriously and were instead completing it in a rushed way right before it was due at the very end of the semester. This led them to use the information-gathering practices that are at their fingertips—the sites they are most familiar with on the Internet. Over the past several years, I have changed the design of my ethics courses to create a better learning experience for students that also overcomes the common challenges we have faced in the past. The assignment is now more narrowly tailored to achieve the Habits of Mind and portable skills that I am hoping to nurture in my students in these classes. In particular, I try to develop Habits of Mind identified by Costa and Kallick (2009) such as questioning and problem posing, listening with understanding and empathy, persistence, and thinking about their thinking. In this chapter, I first outline my course objectives in the form of the Habits of Mind. I then discuss the assignment I gave my students originally and identify the challenges and shortcomings it posed. Then, I outline my new approach and detail how it is better suited to achieve my objectives

Human Identity, Animal Identity, and Reflective Endorsement

In this paper, I will argue that philosophers have overestimated the value of reflective endorsement. Introspection does not, as many philosophers have supposed, shine a searchlight on a person’s authentic identity. Our “selves” are not as transparent to us as we would like to think. In fact, much of the work done in an introspective mood is confabulation or rationalization rather than genuine self-discovery. I will argue that if this is the case, the outputs of the reflective endorsement process are not inherently normative in the way that thinkers like Harry Frankfurt and Christine Korsgaard have suggested. If this is the case, then the identities that we establish through the process of reflective endorsement are not the moral features of our experience that we might have supposed. And if this is the case, then we would be wrong to place other-than-human animals in a different moral category than humans simply because they do not regularly engage in reflective endorsement. In light of the problems that I will identify for the reflective process, a different view of the self will be warranted. I will argue that we learn more about our authentic selves by monitoring our consistent, reliable dispositions to behave. If this is the case, there would no longer be any justification for denying that other-than-human animals have coherent identities through time, since they too demonstrate reliable and predictable behavioral dispositions

Habits of Mind: Designing Courses for Student Success

Although content knowledge remains at the heart of college teaching and learning, forward-thinking instructors recognize that we must also provide 21st-century college students with transferable skills (sometimes called portable intellectual abilities) to prepare them for their futures (Vazquez, 2020; Ritchhart, 2015; Venezia & Jaeger, 2013; Hazard, 2012). To “grow their capacity as efficacious thinkers to navigate and thrive in the face of unprecedented change” (Costa et al., 2023), students must learn and improve important study skills and academic dispositions throughout their educational careers. If we do not focus on skills-building in college courses, students will not be prepared for the challenges that await them after they leave institutions of higher education. If students are not prepared for these postsecondary education challenges, then it is fair to say that college faculty have failed them

New challenges to cultivated meat

Meat production raises a host of ethical problems that a move away from animal agriculture and towards cellular agriculture could, partially, resolve. Unsurprisingly, then, ethicists have offered a range of positive cases for cultivated meat, and ethics has been an important part of the broader conversation about the technology. However, academics continue to raise new ethical challenges to cultivated meat. In this paper, to bolster the positive ethical cases for cultivated meat offered elsewhere, we respond to three recent challenges to cultivated meat. These are Ben Bramble’s argument that we should not want to be the kind of people who want to eat cultivated meat; Carlo Alvaro’s suggestions that a virtuous individual would not eat cultivated meat and that cultivated meat will fail to eliminate animal agriculture; and Elan Abrell’s claim that endorsing cultivated meat represents a missed opportunity. All three challenges, we contend, fail.</p

Interweaving Success Skills & Content: How to Better Meet Students Where They Are

Many students struggle to learn new academic skills when they enter higher education. This situation has been made worse the last few years as students have experienced significant upheaval in their education. Students who have done well in high school or those that have been impacted by changes to their educational experience due to the COVID-19 pandemic may begin to fall behind, get discouraged, and lose confidence in their academic abilities. As a result, many instructors often wrestle with the tricky balance of supporting students in academic skill development or catching students up without compromising the time needed to cover important course content. Many resources are available to help students acquire new academic skills and develop a growth mindset. Still, it\u27s often challenging to connect the right students to the right resources. One solution is to integrate academic skill development with course content. In this session, four experienced university faculty members will discuss specific strategies and methods they have used to integrate academic skills into their courses that have developed from necessity over the last few years. A variety of examples, ranging from philosophy to nutrition, will demonstrate how academic skill development can be integrated in any course. Participants will leave this session with tools and strategies that they can immediately utilize within their own courses

Re-imagine Your Online Discussions: How to Increase Student Engagement

Students often complain that online discussions within courses are boring, lack engagement and ultimately are a form of busywork . If structured and implemented correctly, online discussions have the potential of creating community, and mentorship between other students and the instructor. The presenters in this session represent a cohort of USU faculty that earned an online teaching certification endorsed by the Association of College and University Educators. This group will share ideas that they implemented within their own courses that have helped to 1) create better community within online courses, 2) increase students\u27 capacity for critical thinking, and 3) have made online discussions a more engaging aspect of the course

Risk of COVID-19 after natural infection or vaccinationResearch in context

Summary: Background: While vaccines have established utility against COVID-19, phase 3 efficacy studies have generally not comprehensively evaluated protection provided by previous infection or hybrid immunity (previous infection plus vaccination). Individual patient data from US government-supported harmonized vaccine trials provide an unprecedented sample population to address this issue. We characterized the protective efficacy of previous SARS-CoV-2 infection and hybrid immunity against COVID-19 early in the pandemic over three-to six-month follow-up and compared with vaccine-associated protection. Methods: In this post-hoc cross-protocol analysis of the Moderna, AstraZeneca, Janssen, and Novavax COVID-19 vaccine clinical trials, we allocated participants into four groups based on previous-infection status at enrolment and treatment: no previous infection/placebo; previous infection/placebo; no previous infection/vaccine; and previous infection/vaccine. The main outcome was RT-PCR-confirmed COVID-19 >7–15 days (per original protocols) after final study injection. We calculated crude and adjusted efficacy measures. Findings: Previous infection/placebo participants had a 92% decreased risk of future COVID-19 compared to no previous infection/placebo participants (overall hazard ratio [HR] ratio: 0.08; 95% CI: 0.05–0.13). Among single-dose Janssen participants, hybrid immunity conferred greater protection than vaccine alone (HR: 0.03; 95% CI: 0.01–0.10). Too few infections were observed to draw statistical inferences comparing hybrid immunity to vaccine alone for other trials. Vaccination, previous infection, and hybrid immunity all provided near-complete protection against severe disease. Interpretation: Previous infection, any hybrid immunity, and two-dose vaccination all provided substantial protection against symptomatic and severe COVID-19 through the early Delta period. Thus, as a surrogate for natural infection, vaccination remains the safest approach to protection. Funding: National Institutes of Health

Risk of COVID-19 after natural infection or vaccinationResearch in context

Background: While vaccines have established utility against COVID-19, phase 3 efficacy studies have generally not comprehensively evaluated protection provided by previous infection or hybrid immunity (previous infection plus vaccination). Individual patient data from US government-supported harmonized vaccine trials provide an unprecedented sample population to address this issue. We characterized the protective efficacy of previous SARS-CoV-2 infection and hybrid immunity against COVID-19 early in the pandemic over three-to six-month follow-up and compared with vaccine-associated protection. Methods: In this post-hoc cross-protocol analysis of the Moderna, AstraZeneca, Janssen, and Novavax COVID-19 vaccine clinical trials, we allocated participants into four groups based on previous-infection status at enrolment and treatment: no previous infection/placebo; previous infection/placebo; no previous infection/vaccine; and previous infection/vaccine. The main outcome was RT-PCR-confirmed COVID-19 >7–15 days (per original protocols) after final study injection. We calculated crude and adjusted efficacy measures. Findings: Previous infection/placebo participants had a 92% decreased risk of future COVID-19 compared to no previous infection/placebo participants (overall hazard ratio [HR] ratio: 0.08; 95% CI: 0.05–0.13). Among single-dose Janssen participants, hybrid immunity conferred greater protection than vaccine alone (HR: 0.03; 95% CI: 0.01–0.10). Too few infections were observed to draw statistical inferences comparing hybrid immunity to vaccine alone for other trials. Vaccination, previous infection, and hybrid immunity all provided near-complete protection against severe disease. Interpretation: Previous infection, any hybrid immunity, and two-dose vaccination all provided substantial protection against symptomatic and severe COVID-19 through the early Delta period. Thus, as a surrogate for natural infection, vaccination remains the safest approach to protection. Funding: National Institutes of Health