Category: Education

On average only three in 10 students attending public colleges graduate in four years, with each additional year of college representing both an extra expense and a delay in the earning power a college degree confers.

The University of Vermont is near the top of a new list of public universities that do the best job of helping students avoid these pitfalls and graduate on time.

According to a ranking published in the Chronicle of Higher Education, the University of Vermont’s four-year graduation rate  placed it in the top 5.7 percent among public universities. For public universities that are primarily residential, UVM ranked 17th.  Data for the rankings is drawn from the U.S. Department of Education.

The Chronicle of Higher Education ranking was based on the class of 2015, the last year for which the Department of Education has data. Since then, UVM’s four-year graduation rate has risen even higher, from 62.4 percent to 66.7 percent for the class that graduated in 2019. 

“Helping students graduate on time is one of our most important responsibilities at UVM and is very much a part of our focus on student success,” said Suresh Garimella, president of the University of Vermont. “Being ranked among the top 6 percent of public universities nationally is strong affirmation that the UVM academic experience and support system for students is helping them stay on track.”

Stacey Kostell, UVM’s vice president for enrollment management, cited a number of factors that are helping keep students on schedule, including a new degree audit program that lets them quickly see what courses they need to take to graduate, and an expanded student advising program.

Kostell said that UVM’s emphasis on active learning opportunities also feeds the high level of student success.   

“We place strong emphasis on offering programs that research shows keep students engaged in their learning, like undergraduate research, internships, service-learning, study abroad and capstone experiences,” she said.

Ninety-two percent of UVM students have engaged in one of these practices before they graduate.

“UVM is a very good choice for students looking for an environment that has been carefully designed to help them succeed,” Kostell said.

Source: UVM News

Feeling unhappy and cranky? The treatment: take a walk under some trees in the park. 

That may not be the exact prescription of your doctor, but a first-of-its-kind study shows that visitors to urban parks use happier words and express less negativity on Twitter than they did before their visit—and that their elevated mood lasts, like a glow, for up to four hours afterwards.

The effect is so strong—a team of scientists from the University of Vermont discovered—that the increase in happiness from a visit to an outpost of urban nature is equivalent to the mood spike on Christmas, by far the happiest day each year on Twitter.

With more people living in cities, and growing rates of mood disorders, this research may have powerful implications for public health and urban planning. 

The new study was published August 20 in People and Nature, an open-access journal of the British Ecological Society.

Green matters

For three months, a team of scientists from the University of Vermont studied hundreds of tweets per day that people posted from 160 parks in San Francisco. “We found that, yes, across all the tweets, people are happier in parks,” says Aaron Schwartz, a UVM graduate student who led the new research, “but the effect was stronger in large regional parks with extensive tree cover and vegetation.” Smaller neighborhood parks showed a smaller spike in positive mood and mostly-paved civic plazas and squares showed the least mood elevation.

In other words, it’s not just getting out of work or being outside that brings a positive boost: the study shows that greener areas with more vegetation have the biggest impact. It’s notable that one of the words that shows the biggest uptick in use in tweets from parks is “flowers.”

“In cities, big green spaces are very important for people’s sense of well-being,” says Schwartz; meaning that efforts to protect and expand urban natural areas extend far beyond luxury and second-tier concerns—“we’re seeing more and more evidence that it’s central to promoting mental health,” says Taylor Ricketts, a co-author on the new study and director of the Gund Institute for Environment at UVM.

In recent years, “a big focus in conservation has been on monetary benefits—like: how many dollars of flood damage did we avoid by restoring a wetland?” Ricketts says. “But this study is part of a new wave of research that expands beyond monetary benefits to quantify the direct health benefits of nature. What’s even more innovative here is our focus on mental health benefits —which have been really underappreciated and understudied.”

Measuring happiness

The new study relied on the hedonometer. This online instrument—invented by a team of scientists at UVM and The MITRE Corporation, including Chris Danforth and Peter Dodds, professors at UVM’s Complex Systems Center and co-authors on the new study—has been gathering and analyzing billions of tweets for more than a decade, resulting in numerous scientific papers and extensive global media coverage.  The instrument uses a body of about 10,000 common words that have been scored by a large pool of volunteers for what the scientists call their “psychological valence,” a kind of measure of each word’s emotional temperature.

The volunteers ranked words they perceived as the happiest near the top of a 1-9 scale; sad words near the bottom. Averaging the volunteers’ responses, each word received a score: “happy” itself ranked 8.30, “hahaha” 7.94, and “parks” 7.14. Truly neutral words, “and” and “the” scored 5.22 and 4.98. At the bottom, “trapped” 3.08, “crash” 2.60, and “jail” 1.76. “Flowers” scored a pleasant 7.56.

Using these scores, the team collects some fifty million tweets from around the world each day—“then we basically toss all the words into a huge bucket,” says Dodds—and calculate the bucket’s average happiness score.

Park position

To make the new study, the UVM team fished tweets out of this huge stream—from 4,688 users who publically identify their location—that were geotagged with latitude and longitude in the city of San Francisco. This allowed the team to know which tweets were coming from which parks. “Then, working with the U.S. Forest Service, we developed some new techniques for mapping vegetation of urban areas—at a very detailed resolution, about a thousand times more detailed than existing methods,” says Jarlath O’Neil-Dunne, director of UVM’s Spatial Analysis Laboratory in the UVM Rubenstein School of Environment and Natural Resources and a co-author on the new study. “That’s what really enabled us to get an accurate understanding of how the greenness and vegetation of these urban areas relates to people’s sentiment there.”

“This is the first study that uses Twitter to examine how user sentiment changes before, during, and after visits to different types of parks,” says Schwartz, a doctoral student in the Rubenstein School and Gund Institute graduate fellow supported by the National Science Foundation. “The greener parks show a bigger boost.”

Overall, the tweets posted from these urban parks in San Francisco were happier by a dramatic 0.23 points on the hedonometer scale over the baseline. “This increase in sentiment is equivalent to that of Christmas Day for Twitter as a whole in the same year,” the scientists write.

The cause of affect

“Being in nature offers restorative benefits on dimensions not available for purchase in a store, or downloadable on a screen,” says UVM’s Chris Danforth, a professor of mathematics and fellow in the Gund Institute. He notes that a growing body of research shows an association between time in nature and improved mood, “but the specific causal links are hard to nail down.”

The team of UVM scientists consider several possible mechanisms through which urban nature may improve mental health, including Green Mind Theory that suggests that the negativity bias of the brain, “which may have been evolutionarily advantageous—is constantly activated by the stressors of modern life,” the team writes.

“While we don’t address causality in our study, we do find that negative language—like ‘not,’ ‘no,’ ‘don’t,’ ‘can’t,’—decreased in the period immediately after visits to urban parks,” says Danforth, “offering specific linguistic markers of the mood boost available outside.” Conversely, the study shows that the use of first-person pronouns—“I” and “me”—drops off dramatically in parks, perhaps indicating “a shift from individual to collective mental frame,” the scientists write.

Of course, Twitter users are not a representative sample of all people—just who are the “twitter-afflicted” (as Adam Gopnik wrote in a recent issue of the New Yorker) who pick up their phone to tweet from a park? Still, Twitter users are a broad demographic, earlier research shows, and this approach to near-real-time remote sensing via Twitter posts—not based on self-reporting—gives a new window for scientists onto the shifting moods of very large groups. 

The nature of happiness has been pondered by philosophers for centuries and studied by psychologists for decades, but this new study suggests it might be as clear as that: in nature, people tend to be more happy—and that’s a finding “that may help public health officials and governments make plans and investments,” says UVM’s Aaron Schwartz.

Source: UVM News

The University of Vermont and the Cold Regions Research and Engineering Laboratory (CRREL) signed an Educational Partnership Agreement today that will lead to a wide range of education and research-oriented exchanges between the two organizations.

CRREL, based in Hanover N.H., is part of the United States Army Engineer Research and Development Center (ERDC). It is a national resource for cold regions science and engineering. CRREL scientists and engineers seek innovative, interdisciplinary solutions to the challenges faced by the Army, the Department of Defense and the nation in the earth’s cold and complex environments.

The broad purpose of the agreement is to encourage and enhance study in the STEM disciplines — science, technology, engineering and math – at UVM by connecting students with the equipment and personnel at the lab, involving them with projects and providing them with career advice.

Much of the work at the lab will be designed so students can receive academic credit for it.

In addition, UVM faculty will assist staff at CRREL in various research projects the lab is conducting and will conduct their own research that could advance the goals of the lab. 

“This is a great opportunity for our students to work at the cutting edge of scientific research, with highly sophisticated equipment and skilled scientists,” said Richard Galbraith, UVM’s vice president for research. “Our hope is that it will both enhance their academics and give them real world research experience that will help them after they graduate,” he said.

“I am delighted that we’ve added UVM to our educational partnership group,” said CRREL director Dr. Joseph Corriveau. “The agreement gives the lab staff anther chance to work with a great university and affords UVM students with opportunities to experience a diversity of thought and technical agility in solving scientific and engineering challenges, thereby contributing to their overall academic experience.”

The U.S. Army Engineer Research and Development Center is one of the premier engineering and scientific research organizations in the world. As the research organization of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, ERDC conducts R&D in support of soldier, military installation and civil works projects, federal agencies, state and municipal authorities, and U.S. industry through innovative work agreements. 

Source: UVM News

It was a scene you don’t often see in academia.

Clustered around computer screens in a classroom in Jeffords Hall were small groups of faculty in widely divergent disciplines – Psychiatry, Business, Ecology, Community Entrepreneurship and Engineering – engaged in animated conversation.

The disciplinary mash-up, and the engaged dialog, were exactly the point of the get-together, the latest meet-up – held last May – of UVM’s Faculty Activity Network, or FAN, says Richard Galbraith, the university’s vice president for research, who created the program in 2015. 

“Everyone is so busy, everyone is working so hard, there’s no time” for faculty to venture outside their disciplinary bubbles to see what’s going on in other parts of the university, Galbraith says, despite the fact that they know funders favor interdisciplinary research and complex contemporary problems usually benefit from it.

“The idea of FAN is to make that time.”     

Research gameified

The time was being well spent in the Jeffords Hall. 

The host of the session was the Social Ecological Gaming and Simulation, or SEGS, Lab, located down the hall in Jeffords, where a group of faculty and students have developed a suite of computer games that simulate real world challenges. When a large sample of people play the games, their collective choices reveal otherwise hard-to-get-at behavioral tendencies and attitudes, a research methodology UVM is pioneering.

Several of those games were on display on the computer screens at the FAN, including one – developed with part of a $7.4 million USDA grant the university received in 2015 – set on a farm that gave players varying incentives to take more or less risky steps to protect livestock from the threat of disease. PLOS ONE recently published a paper on the findings. SEGS managing director Scott Merrill was the lead author.

For Chris Koliba, co-director of the lab, FAN presents a unique opportunity to find collaborators in different disciplines.

“The goal of our FAN is to seed these simulation tools into other domains,” he says. “We’ve got a  high functioning team here, and we’re looking to collaborate with colleagues across the campus who are working in research areas that we’re not in currently, who might be interested in the methods that are being shared today.”

That message hit home for Diann Gaalema, an associate professor of Psychiatry, whose current work uses a variety of methods, from analyzing survey data to conducting clinical trials, to gauge the consequences for smokers, some unintended, of a proposed FDA regulation reducing the amount nicotine in cigarettes.          

“This is a different modality for modeling,” she says. “One of the students (involved in the SEGS lab) was saying, playing a game seems more interesting than taking a survey. If you could gamify surveys, that would not be a bad thing.”

From FAN to Network

For Geography associate professor Pablo Bose, a FAN session he helped host in 2016 has been a game-changer. When Bose arrived at UVM, he soon realized that UVM faculty in a variety of disciplines were working with Burlington’s refugee population, as he was. 

“When the first FAN announcement came out, I thought, wow, this is great,” he says. “It’s an opportunity to actually get people together, to find out who else is doing this kind of work and to figure out what would we do as a network.”

The FAN meeting happened, and it led to others. “We had people in education, in medicine, in CALS, as well as Arts & Sciences. We came together, we talked about the research we were doing and the different things we kind of wanted to do.”

One outcome was a website listing all UVM faculty doing research with refugees, with thumbnail descriptions of their work – essentially a menu for potential collaboration.

The network, and the collaborations, also helped Bose win a Carnegie Foundation grant to build the capacity of the Association of Africans Living in Vermont, a non-profit many UVM faculty work with. Bose is also in conversation with the Ford Foundation to establish a Center for Refugee and Immigration Studies, building on the work of the UVM faculty network.

Long game

While the long-range goal of the FAN program is to help promote a faculty research culture of interdisciplinary collaboration, Galbraith likes to stay relaxed about the short-term, which could yield any number of outcomes he’d be happy with.

“They could range from ‘That was really interesting, and I need to get back to work,’ to ‘Yeah, I knew something about this and now I know a lot more and I’m better informed,’ all the way to ‘We need to talk more because maybe we could do something together,’” he says.     

The program also comes with a perk: a lunch in Waterman Manor after the lab session with Galbraith, whose only cost is for participants is to weather the friendly interrogation the research vice president launches at his lunch companions.

“I want to know, ‘What did you learn? What surprised you? What was interesting to you? What do you think you might want to follow up on?’” he says.

Participants can also apply for a $1,000 grant to further any collaborations that came out of the FAN. About one-third of the 27 FANS that have taken place over the years have inspired grant applications, including the one Bose organized.

Creating an environment where interdisciplinary research is the norm at UVM will take time, Galbraith says.

“FAN is a very conscious effort, but it’s just step one in a long process, whereby maybe people open themselves up more to what else is going on. We’re playing the long game.” 

To propose a FAN session, visit this website.

Source: UVM News

Sen. Patrick Leahy, vice chairman of the Senate Appropriations Committee, announced Thursday that the University of Vermont is receiving $6.6 million from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) Health Resources and Services Administration’s Rural Communities Opioid Response Program for Rural Centers of Excellence on Substance Use Disorders.

Drawing on the groundbreaking work being done at the University of Vermont and the UVM Medical Center to address opioid addiction in rural America, Leahy authored and included provisions in the fiscal year 2019 Labor-HHS Appropriations Act to provide $20 million in new funding to establish three “Rural Centers of Excellence on Substance Use Disorders” around the country.

Leahy said: “Every community and every family has been touched in some way by the struggle of addiction. Rural communities, like those across Vermont, have been at the front lines of the opioid epidemic. These are communities that face unique challenges in confronting this crisis. And Vermont, like so many times before, is leading the nation in addressing this crisis. As a Center of Excellence, the University of Vermont in collaboration with the UVM Medical Center and other statewide partners will be able to build on their innovative work to combat addiction and apply those lessons to rural communities around the country. It is my hope that this new center will help rural communities confront halt the scourge of opioid and other addictions in their tracks.”

This funding will go toward the creation of a University of Vermont Center on Rural Addiction that will be dedicated to identifying, translating, disseminating, and implementing Hub and Spoke, Community Reinforcement Approach and other evidence-based to address the opioid epidemic in rural communities. The Center of Excellence at the University of Vermont will implement the rollout of three strategic priorities including surveillance, education and outreach, and technical assistance to rural communities.

Suresh Garimella, the University of Vermont’s president, said: “We at the University of Vermont are honored and grateful to have been selected to receive this significant award which will contribute to stemming the devastating effects of substance abuse in Vermont and the nation, in keeping with our land-grant mission. This grant provides UVM an opportunity to build on our outstanding basic science research to address this major societal challenge, partnered with the unparalleled clinical care provided by the University of Vermont Medical Center to patients with opioid dependence.”

As Appropriations vice chairman, Leahy secured $20 million in the 2019 Appropriations Act that provides funding for the HHS Department to establish three centers dedicated to the unique needs of rural communities in addressing the opioid crisis. With unique challenges like access to treatment and prevention centers, rural communities have been devastated by the opioid epidemic with greater rates of lethal overdoses than their urban counterparts.

Vermont has led the nation in confronting this crisis in rural America with new and innovative approaches like the Hub and Spoke model, which takes a system-wide approach to addressing addiction. The University of Vermont has been a leading contributor to much of this pioneering work across the state and has taken their findings to other rural communities across the country that seek innovative, successful ways to deploy new federal resources provided in recent years to combat the opioid epidemic.

Leahy drew on this innovative and collaborative approach in creating the Rural Communities Opioid Response Program. Other recipients of the grants are New York and Georgia. The centers will focus on researching science-based, community approaches to the opioid crisis and implementing those approaches around the country by providing scientific and technical assistance.

Source: UVM News

The University of Vermont is again one of the nation’s top colleges, according to The Princeton Review. The education services company profiles and recommends UVM in the 2020 edition of its annual guide for undergraduates, The Best 385 Colleges.

Only about 13 percent of America’s 3,000 four-year colleges are included in the book, which is one of The Princeton Review’s most popular publications. The company chooses colleges for the book based on data it annually collects from administrators about their institutions’ academic offerings.

The Princeton Review also considers data it gathers from its surveys of college students who rate and report on various aspects of their campus and community experiences for this project.

Based on student feedback, UVM ranks as #17 for Best Health Services, #19 for College City Gets High Marks, and #20 for Their Students Love These Colleges. The university is also listed as #3 for Top 50 Green Colleges, among other rankings.

In their survey responses, UVM students characterize the school as “academically rigorous,” offering “great academics in a great area with lots to do while getting a great education.” They describe their fellow students as “intelligent, hardworking, cooperative, and all-around good people” who show “exceptional passion for what they do, whether in the classroom or out.”

Source: UVM News

Of all people, Wolfgang Mieder would seem to deserve the peace of mind that comes from hard work and goals accomplished.

Over his nearly half century at UVM, the gregarious German professor has written or edited well over 200 book and published over 500 articles on proverbs, his academic specialty. For decades he’s produced a massive annual of proverb criticism called Proverbium, published at UVM. He’s given more than 500 talks in two dozen countries on his special topic. And he’s been the subject of no less than six festschriftenn, collections of essays written by scholars commemorating a fellow expert.  

But for a good decade, Mieder has been troubled.   

The source of his worry? A bulging addition to his home, the largest room in the house, that held – in floor-to-ceiling shelves covering all four walls – the massive array of proverb collections and proverb studies he had accumulated over five decades of acquisition.  

It wasn’t the strain on the domestic infrastructure caused by his habit of adding 100 new books a year that was making him anxious; it was what would happen to all those volumes in the future. Mieder turned 75 this year.

His wife Barbara, surveying the stuffed shelves, would ask, “Wolfgang, you’re getting to an age; what am I to do if something happens you?” Mieder recalls.

“It was such a unique library, I didn’t want it to be dispersed,” Mieder says. “That was my big worry – seeing the books end up at some book sale selling for a dollar apiece.”

That would be a significant loss, and not just for sentimental reasons.

Is the last few years, hordes of proverb scholars from the U.S., Kenya, China, Germany, Ireland, Hungary, Russia, Spain and beyond have trooped to Mieder’s home in Williston to access his proverb collections in two dozen languages and dip into proverb studies with titles like The Adages of Erasmus and “Right Makes Might”: Proverbs and the American Worldview, Mieder’s latest.

“There really is no other collection like it in the world,” Mieder says. 

The logical way to preserve such a treasure would be to transfer it to the special collections department of a university. But time and again, at universities abroad and in the U.S., including UVM, Mieder heard the same story – his collection was too much of a good thing.

“Nobody wants collections,” he says. “There isn’t the space.”

The size was a deal-breaker, confirms Jeff Marshall, Special Collections director at UVM. “There simply wasn’t room for it.”

Friends in high places

The topic of what would happen to his collection was never far from Mieder’s mind, and he wasn’t above giving voice to his worries with his friends, some of whom – like Leslie and Tom Sullivan, UVM’s former president –  were not only sympathetic, but in a position to help.

At Mieder’s 75^th birthday party, a gala lunch held in the Alumni House’s Pavilion in February, the German professor was seated next to the Sullivans.

“He’s always sharing with me what his new books are, and I’ve seen his library,” Sullivan said. “He said, as he’s said before, ‘I’m not quite sure what I’m going to do with my books.’”

By coincidence, Sullivan had just returned from a visit to the Billings Library, where  North Lounge, a majestic room once stuffed with books when Billings was UVM’s only library, was now eerily book-free while Special Collections staff puzzled over the space. It lacked the security to house any of the department’s collections. What could go there instead?

“Wolfgang, I have an idea; I’ll get back to you,” Sullivan said to his lunch companion.

Solution looking for a problem

Sullivan promptly paid a visit to then dean of libraries Mara Saule and suggested Mieder’s collection would be a perfect fit for North Lounge. She warmed to the idea, likening Mieder’s books and North Lounge to two puzzle pieces that fit together perfectly.

Marshall – who was close to moving a large collection of surplus books to the space for ornamental purposes only – was also bullish.

The North Lounge space was “a solution looking for a problem,” he says, and one had magically appeared.

“Once it clicked, everyone was like, this is perfect,” says Selene Colburn, UVM Libraries’ communications director.

Sullivan, whose office contributed six sets of three book shelves to the project, delivered the news to Mieder, who was delighted.

About two months later, his collection of 8,000 volumes – 6,000 from Mieder’s home and another 2,000 in a proverb archives down the hall from his office in Waterman Building –  had taken up residence in Billings, moved in two giant truckloads and placed on the shelves in careful order by Mieder and three library staff.

The Wolgang Mieder International Proverb Library, the only one of its kind, officially opened in the middle of May.

For Mieder, the worry is gone. 

“It’s dream come true, and I couldn’t be more grateful to UVM,” he said. “My American colleagues all say this is just incredible that the university has done this.”

Marshall is happy, too. “It looks great. And it’s a meaningful collection that will be useful to scholars.”

And there are ancillary benefits.  

Those proverb scholars from around the world whom Mieder hosted at his home for days on end?

“Now they can sit at the library all day, and I’ll take them out to dinner.”

 

Source: UVM News