The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching
The Emerging Scholars Program (ESP) was developed at UC Berkeley in 1978 as an effort to increase the numbers of underrepresented minority students who not only passed, but excelled in the freshman mathematics courses that served as a gateway (or barrier) to the technical majors. The program was based on Uri Treisman's research that found that the source of difficulty for African American students in calculus was not due to-as was commonly assumed-lack of motivation, poor high school preparation, or socioeconomic background. Rather the difficulty was related to the students' academic and social isolation on campus. Based on this observation, ESP is a multicultural program that integrates curriculum and community. For more than twenty years and on numerous campuses, more than two-thirds of the students who have participated in ESP and similar programs have earned grades of B or better in their mathematics or science courses. The speaker, who was the researcher with ESP, will describe lessons learned in the development and the dissemination of the Emerging Scholars Program. Though not directly about learning styles or assessment, this talk will describe how to create a setting in which students of diverse backgrounds can use the strengths and aspirations they bring to higher education
Dr. Rose Asera worked with Professor Uri Treisman at UC Berkeley on the national dissemination of the award-winning Emerging Scholars Program. In 199192, Asera was a Fulbright Fellow and taught research methods at the National Institute of Education at Kyambogo, Uganda and subsequently worked with the UNICEF on development of community health education materials. From 1995–1999 she was the Director of Research and Evaluation at the Charles A. Dana Center at the University of Texas at Austin. Asera is presently a Senior Scholar at the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, and is working on a study of teacher education.