Undergraduate research at UNCG

Each year, the Undergraduate Research, Scholarship, and Creativity Office here at UNCG hosts the Thomas Undergraduate Research and Creativity Expo, which provides a venue for undergraduates engaged in faculty-mentored projects to present their scholarly and creative work to the university community. This, the 11th such event at UNCG, included over 200 students, four of whom worked with me on various topics:

• I participated in an Ashby Dialogue last year that focused on the use of Social Network Analysis (SNA) in archaeology. As part of that dialogue, I was asked to lead a discussion in my area of expertise, the Paleolithic. I soon discovered that there was, in fact, no example to discuss. So, I downloaded some data and threw it into Cytoscape to see if a SNA approach could provide some insight on social landscapes during the Magdalenian. This time period is justifiably well-known for its beautiful portable art, which provides a rich database of social information. I have since become really intrigued by SNA, and it just so happens that a colleague in the Department of Computer Science, Jing Deng, specializes in social networks. After a couple of informal meetings, Jing and I decided to recruit two undergraduates, one from anthropology and one from computer science, to work with us on a collaborative project. We secured some funding from the Undergraduate Research, Scholarship, and Creativity Office to support Amanda Chase (anthropology) and Nathan Arnold (computer science). While Amanda collected data on Magdalenian artwork, Nathan programmed, from scratch, an application that (1) allows users to upload archaeological data; (2) visualize the location of archaeological sites in true geographic space; (3) calculate the similarity of archaeological artifacts based on artistic motifs; (4) visualize the archaeological sites in "network" space to identify social relationships. Amanda (oral presentation) and Nathan (poster presentation) both did a great job, and Jing and I are currently putting together a grant proposal to secure long-term funding for this project.

• As part of my research at Olduvai Gorge and as director UNCG's Olduvai Gorge Paleoanthropology Field School, I am engaged in a long-term project to document the distribution of bones on modern landscapes. Olduvai lies on the eastern edge of the Serengeti, and I am particularly interested in the factors that influence where bones are distributed in this dynamic area. Ultimately, I hope to apply this information to the fossil assemblages that we are excavating within the gorge itself. In 2015 and 2017, we collected over a thousand bones from two microhabitats: an open, treeless grassland and a wooded area surrounding a seasonal watering hole. Faith Wilfong, who was recently accepted to the graduate program in anthropology at the University of Iowa, attended the 2017 field school and, with funding from the Undergraduate Research, Scholarship, and Creativity Office, helped me analyze these two bone assemblages. Faith found that the open grassland assemblage likely accumulated over decades, which, given how dispersed the bones are, implies that even diffuse scatters of bones require a long time to form through "natural" (i.e., non-human) processes. She also found striking differences in the density and pattern of distribution of bones within the two microhabitats. Bones were much, much more common in the wooded habitat and tended to be distributed most densely under trees. Faith presented these data as an oral presentation at the expo and as a poster at the Paleoanthropology Meetings in Austin.

• Finally, I worked with Ashley Nelson (who participated in the 2016 Olduvai Field School) on an open-access, online paleoanthropology database. The University Libraries here at UNCG offer Digital Partners Grants, which provide library expertise to a faculty member interested in working on a digital project. I was lucky enough to be awarded one of these grants, and I recruited Ashley to help put together a database that cataloged the location and artifact and fossil inventories of paleoanthropological sites. We are working with the extremely capable Danny Nanez, a web applications developer with the University Libraries, to get this database online and available for researchers to not only map paleoanthropological sites but query them based on age, artifact type(s), and the presence/absence of fossils. I hope that this will be a useful tool for researchers, students, and instructors alike. 

I should also point out that another one of our undergraduates, Curran Fitzgerald, working under the direction of our own Donna Nash, won first place for his poster presentation "Archaeoastronomical analysis of Wari ritual spaces in the Osmore Valley, Peru."

Building the National Museum of African American History and Culture

The Harriet Elliott Lecture Series is one of UNCG's marquee events. The College of Arts and Sciences has a large endowment to bring dynamic speakers to campus to address important and timely issues within the social sciences. The event cycles among the departments within the College here at UNCG, and this year's host department was History, who organized everything around the theme "The Power of History: Memory and Representation."

The keynote speaker was Dr. Lonnie Bunch, the founding director of the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture. As the Chair of the Harriet Elliott Steering Committee, I had the pleasure of meeting him in person before the keynote address on the evening of March 27th. An extremely pleasant person, Dr. Bunch was at ease discussing everything from history to baseball. (He did relate a disturbing story about White supremacists who would periodically visit the museum to laugh at the slavery exhibits.)

The keynote address, which was attended by about 190 people, was entitled "Building the National Museum of African American History and Culture." Dr. Bunch is a wonderful storyteller. He was so engaging, in fact, that I was hardly aware of the passage of time: I couldn't believe that an entire hour had elapsed. Some of the highlights:

• I was surprised to learn that serious schemes to create a museum dedicated to African American history and culture first appeared before World War I, and President Calvin Coolidge signed legislation in 1929 that created a commission to design and construct such a museum. Unfortunately, pressure from Southern politicians ensured that no funding was attached to the resolution, and the onset of the Great Depression sidetracked the enterprise. It was not until 2003, when President George W. Bush signed another authorization, that momentum for a museum again gained traction.
• The story about the museum's collection was particularly fascinating. With what was essentially the Smithsonian's version of Antique Roadshow, Dr. Bunch and his staff scoured the country for items. Ultimately, of the ~40,000 pieces in the museum's collection, about 70%, including a bible owned by Nat Turner, were pulled from peoples' attics, basements, and garages.    
• The final price tag for the museum came to $540,000,000, and the average visit lasts about 4-6 hours. (The average visit for the other Smithsonian museums is about 1.5 hours.)
• While assembling the collection was a gargantuan challenge, the most difficult task was deciding what sort of museum to build. The ultimate goal, Dr. Bunch said, was to confront what it means to be an American. So, the museum needed to create not only a Black experience, but an American experience. Dr. Bunch also wanted the museum to humanize history and, in so doing, help people embrace ambiguity and nuance. What, then, should the museum be about? Pain? Slavery? Famous firsts? Should the exhibits and the museum be for African-Americans alone? The answer was to find the right tension between all of them. My sense is that the purpose of the museum is to invite people to take ownership of our past, to confront memory, and to invite reconciliation. 

History organized a follow-up panel discussion, attended by ~85 people, entitled "History Matters: Searching for LGBT History" featuring John D'Emilio and Mandy Carter. Hats off to the Organizing Committee from History, especially Anne Parsons and Asa Egar, who put together an absolutely fantastic event.

I think the impact that the museum could have on Americans was expressed best by Princey Jenkins, a 93-year-old African-American who, when interviewed by Dr. Bunch during the planning phase of the museum project, said "People used to remember. Now they forget."

When did humans start deliberately disposing of their dead?

Research continues to reveal that non-human animals recognize death and express what we would call grief for the loss of a group member. There is no doubt that this narrows the perceived gap between humans and other animals and reinforces the continuity of life. As far as we know, however, we humans are the only species that is fully aware of our own mortality. With this realization comes the ability (or curse?) to anticipate and contemplate our death and the deaths of others. We express this "mortality salience" (to use the term of social psychologist Jeff Greenberg and his colleagues) in part through elaborate mortuary rituals. When did humans develop this mortality salience, and how might we tell?

While much of the symbolic meaning associated with these rituals does not fossilize, some behaviors, such as the creation and interment of grave goods, the intentional modification of human remains and, most pertinent to this post, the deliberate disposal of the dead, can potentially survive in the archaeological record. There is a growing consensus that by ~120,000 years ago Neandertals and other Middle Paleolithic humans intentionally buried their dead and, in some cases, perhaps even collected the bones of the dead for secondary burial (the evidence for grave offerings remains equivocal). The case for deliberate disposal before the Middle Paleolithic is more contentious, and the present debate revolves around the Sima de los Huesos in the Sierra de Atapuerca in Spain and the Dinaledi Chamber in the Rising Star Cave System of South Africa. Dated to between 300,000 and 600,000 years ago, these remarkable fossil assemblages are composed nearly exclusively of human bones. What is more, the skeletons are found in difficult-to-access chambers deep within the cave systems. These are extraordinary finds, and it is reasonable to ask: (1) if they represent the remains of corpses that were deliberately disposed of and, if so, (2) whether the process of corpse disposal was infused with some deeper cultural meaning, as it is among modern humans.

My colleagues and I recently put in our two cents worth on this topic in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (the study has garnered some modest publicity in Spain and the United States). Thankfully, both the Atapuerca and Rising Star research teams have published extensively so that their data are available to other paleoanthropologists. After my friend, colleague, and former PhD adviser Travis Pickering pored over the frequencies of skeletal elements from the Dinaledi Chamber, he told me the pattern was not what one would expect if complete bodies were being deposited in the cave. We therefore decided to put together a small database of skeletal element data from other sites with primate remains. I eventually found over 30 datasets that ranged from modern forensic cases and leopard-consumed baboons to 3.2-million-year-old autralopiths. Another good friend and colleague, Manuel Domínguez-Rodrigo, argued that a machine-learning approach would be appropriate here, since these sorts of algorithms might be able to distinguish among the different types of assemblages based on patterns of skeletal element preservation.

Essentially, we found that the pattern of bone preservation in the Sima de los Huesos and the Dinaledi Chamber is different from that seen in complete skeletons. Now, this in and of itself does not refute the hypothesis that the Sima and Dinaledi remains were deliberately disposed of--even intentionally buried bodies can be scavenged or moved around after their original deposition. (In fact, we think it is likely that carnivores consumed some of the softer bones at both sites.) What was most intriguing to us, though, was the fact that both the Sima and Dinaledi consistently clustered with an assemblage of baboon bones from an active cave system in South Africa called Misgrot. This cave, which was investigated by two other colleagues, Jason Heaton and Colin Menter, preserved over a thousand baboon bones, some of which were found as partial skeletons. Since the baboons aren't being intentionally dropped into the cave by conspecifics (the cave is used mainly as a sleeping site), it stands to reason that you don't need to invoke deliberate disposal to explain the skeletal part frequencies of either the Sima or Dinaledi. It is, in other words, possible to get a collection of partially complete, large-bodied primates into a cave through natural processes.

We are careful to note that these findings don't disprove the deliberate disposal hypothesis at these sites. Is it possible that some time before 300,000 years ago early humans were intentionally dumping bodies into caves? Sure. Is it even possible that this behavior had some sort of symbolic meaning behind it? Absolutely. But, as the aphorism made famous by Carl Sagan goes, "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence." So, to quote our paper, neither the Sima or Dinaledi "currently qualifies as unequivocal evidence for emergent mortality salience in the human lineage."

References:

Egeland, CP, Domínguez-Rodrigo, M, Pickering, TR, Menter, CG, Heaton, JL (2018). Hominin skeletal part abundances and claims of deliberate corpse disposal in the Middle Pleistocene. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1718678115

Teach like a puma!

I attended another workshop recently (11.1) hosted by our Teaching Innovation Office here at UNCG that was provocatively titled: "Teaching Like a Puma: Strategies You Can Use to Make Learning More Interesting for You and Your Students." Dr. Todd Zakrajsek led the workshop.

You are probably wondering, as I was, about the workshop's title. I'll paraphrase Zakrajsek's explanation. Imagine you are walking down the sidewalk and suddenly encounter a tree in your way. What do you do? Most likely, you would simply slide around it and continue on your way without paying much attention. Now, imagine a puma, rather than a tree, was in your way. Your mind, of course, would attend immediately to the situation. What does this mean for learning? The brain becomes accustomed, and thus numbed, to constant stimuli. Just like our brains begin to ignore the trees we encounter every day, so too are they less likely to actively attend to, and thus less likely to learn from, repetitive learning strategies. Teaching like a puma, then, means that instructors should use a diversity of teaching strategies to cover course material so that student brains do not become numb to constant stimuli.

Zakrajsek also asked us to consider the following scenario: a pro golfer will score very, very well on an easy course and will score more poorly on a difficult course. A solid, but not spectacular, golfer will likewise score well on an easy course but, in contrast to the pro, will score much, much more poorly on a difficult course. What's going on? Well, the pro golfer is going to do pretty well regardless of the course, while a solid golfer will show vast variation when switching between an easy and difficult course (see Figure 1 below).

Figure 1. The difference in performance on easy and difficult courses between a pro and solid golfer. A pro golfer will score well in either situation while a solid golfer will show great variation in scores between the two situations. Note that, in golf, a low score is better than a high score.

Now, replace "golfer" with "learner," and "pro" and "solid" with "high achieving" and "low achieving," and the connection with teaching becomes clear. High achievers will typically do well regardless of course difficulty, while low achievers can do well in easy courses but tend to really, really struggle in more difficult courses. Instructors should seek to reduce this discrepancy by trying to modify courses, especially difficult ones, without sacrificing content and rigor. This should flatten out the top line in Figure 1. We can mix things up, as mentioned before, and introduce more dynamic lecturing methods. These modifications can make the courses "easier" for lower achieving students by engaging them more deeply in the material.

The last theme centered on mindset (see one of my past posts for more on this). It's worthwhile to reinforce the importance of hard work, that failure happens and is okay, and scaffolding (that is, the process of getting better at a skill). One interesting idea that Zakrajsek mentioned was to ask students to share (with a partner, with the class, etc.) something that they're good at. The next step is to ask them to relate HOW they became good at it. This naturally leads to a discussion of practice, hard work, etc. Students should be able to link this process to learning as well.

Cooperative learning

The Teaching Innovation Office here at UNCG hosted a workshop last month (10.12) on cooperative learning. The workshop was led by Dr. Stan Friedland, who has spent the last 50 plus years in education as a teacher, high school principal, guidance counselor, and college instructor. He is officially retired but still consults and, of course, runs workshops on cooperative learning.

I was immediately intrigued by this workshop since I had never heard of this particular learning strategy before. Cooperative learning is, in a nutshell, a very specific method of group-based learning. The approach is based on the following tenets:

• A shift away from an individualistic and competitive classroom and toward a cooperative, student-owned classroom. The former approach is in fact so deeply ingrained in the American education system that before Dr. Friedland pointed it out, I realized that I took it for granted. It's true, though: in most classrooms and in most assignments, there is little or no incentive for students to assist each other because grades are tied to each individual's performance. Students even remain competitive when working within the context of traditional group assignments. 
• The interaction of mixed ability students. This is a particularly compelling reason to implement cooperative learning: every member within the group, regardless of achievement, shares the same status, and social contact in this context leads to improved relationships between students who typically share very little in terms of socio-economic background and life experience.

The ultimate goal, then, is to motivate cooperation. A standard cooperative learning activity goes something like this:

1. Assign students to groups. It is important to create mixed ability groups, and high achieving students must be grouped with low achieving students.

2. Students are assigned to one of four roles: the coordinator, the praiser/encourager, the recorder−each of which is self-explanatory−and the gatekeeper, who is responsible for ensuring that everyone (1) understands their specific task, (2) asks questions, and (3) avoids the temptation to let others do all the work.

3. The group is given a specific task that cannot be completed without positive interdependence and face-to-face interaction. While each student is accountable for their own work, they are also responsible for the team's improvement (see below how this works).

4. Each group receives bonus points based on the scores of each team member. This is supposed to encourage cooperation and thus (1) incentivize the investment by higher achieving students in the success of lower achieving students and (2) require students to teach each other the material, which, research shows, results in higher rates of information retention than, say, simply hearing about the material during a lecture. Dr. Friedland suggested the following routine: after the first exam, students are placed into groups, and the average exam score for each group is taken as that group's baseline score. The cooperative learning task or tasks are then assigned, and the students are told that if their team's average score increases on the next exam, each member will receive bonus points equivalent to the increase in the team's average score from one exam to the other. While instructors are often leery of awarding bonus points, this method typically results in only a few extra points and, in the end, can really motivate students to work together toward a shared goal. He also stressed that cooperative learning should not, indeed cannot, replace traditional teaching methods. In fact, he said that cooperative learning activities should take up no more than about 33% of class time, and it's critical for the instructor to provide some background information prior to the activity and then wrap up and summarize the learning outcomes after each activity.

After attending the workshop, I realized that I implement some aspects of cooperative learning in my classes. I randomly place students in groups, for example, and assign specific roles like recorder and a reporter. I now realize, too, that in order to make these assignments truly cooperative, I need to be more deliberate about group assignments to ensure truly mixed-ability teams. I also need to make sure that the learning outcomes from the group assignments are assessed on exams so that students take cooperation seriously. Looking forward to trying this method out more systematically....

Engaging modern learners

Back in May I attended a meeting at North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University, which is just down the road from UNCG. The get together was sponsored by the Association of American Colleges and Universities and its Project Kaleidoscope, which is a higher education reform center that is, according to its website, dedicated to "empowering STEM faculty, including those from underrepresented groups, to graduate more students in STEM fields who are competitively trained and liberally educated." The theme for this regional meeting was "Engaging Modern Learners through Innovative Teaching Pedagogies."

The keynote speaker was Dr. Christy Price, who is a psychologist in the Department of Health and Physical Education at Dalton State University. Her specialties include teaching techniques that influence student motivation and engage Millennial learners. The title of her presentation was "The New 'R's for Engaging Modern Learners" and began with a discussion of generational mindsets. While she discussed the characteristics of Boomers (born between ca. 1943 and 1960) and Gen X (born between ca. 1961 and 1981), I'll stick with Gen Y or Millennials, since the majority of the students I teach come from this generation. Definitions vary, but most folks consider Millennials as those born during or after the early 1980s. As a group, they tend to (1) focus on grades rather than learning; (2) be less formal in their relationships both with their peers and their instructors; (3) have short attention spans; (4) deflect the responsibility for their education onto others; (5) need instantaneous feedback; (6) have trouble with time management. Dr. Price acknowledged that these traits may not necessarily characterize every student from this generation, nor are they exclusive to Millennials, but they do (and I agree based on my own experiences) provide useful generalizations that can help us as instructors cater our teaching strategies to student needs.

Okay, here are her "R"s for engaging modern learners:

• Responsibility. As discussed above, Millennials feel that responsibility for their education lies exclusively with the instructor. The problem with this mindset is that it does not motivate students to learn. How do we motivate them? Dr. Price cited a study in which 98% of a sample of 201 students responded that the methods of instruction and the characteristics of the instructor influenced their motivation to learn. The lesson here is that (1) the structure of the course should be the instructor's responsibility; (2) a successful structure increases student motivation; and (3) motivated students are more likely to take responsibility for their own education and, thus, learn more.
• Research-based Pedagogies. Good instructors must acknowledge the pedagogical methods that have been shown to work. Some examples:
• The literature suggests that attention begins to drift off after about 20 minutes, so it is best to break up classes every so often with a question, discussion, or other activity to allow for processing time.
• It is also becoming increasingly clear that the brain is a novelty-seeker: the more novel the situation, the more the brain attends to it (this is also a point raised by Terry Doyle in his plenary presentation at the Lilly Conference last year). So, students need variety in topics and delivery.
• Problem-, team-, research-, and community engagement-based learning is particularly powerful.
• Some of her own research shows the top five factors that:
• motivate student attendance are linked to an instructor that (5) is enthusiastic, (4) explains concepts well, (3) makes class enjoyable and fun, (2) has an attendance policy that impacts the grade, and (1) involves students by asking questions and assigning discussions, group work, hands-on activities, and case studies.
• heighten student interest and attention are linked to an instructor that (5) embeds humor, (4) is not monotone, (3) explains concepts well, (2) utilizes multimedia, and (1) involves students by asking questions and assigning discussions, group work, hands-on activities, and case studies.
• motivate students to do work outside of class are (5) assignments that permits students to share their own point of view, (4) assignments that apply to students' lives, (3) an instructor that cares, encourages, or offers help, (2) extra credit or bonus points, and (1) assignments that are required and collected for a grade.
• Relaxed Learning Environment. Millennials appreciate a non-authoritarian learning environment with some built-in flexibility in course structure. One key aspect of this is an instructor that cares about their students. Another factor essentially mirrors the move in higher education away from the "sage on the stage" or "information delivery" model towards a facilitator model. This breaks down the traditional authority role of the instructor and makes students more comfortable speaking and learning from each other.  
• Rationale for Everything. While perhaps a bit annoying from the instructor's perspective, this R is really about relevance. Why, students ask themselves, am a I doing this assignment anyway? As instructors, it is important to provide an answer to this question, and it is more self-evident when the applications are either personal or authentic. Connecting content to student interests and their futures is also a good idea. 
• Rapport with Students. Teaching is persuasive. Before you freak out, its persuasiveness lies not in convincing students that course information is correct, but in advertising how cool the material is. This encourages students to want to reach the learning goals you, as the instructor, set out for them. Excitement of this kind helps build a close, supportive environment, which creates a positive emotional experience for students. 

The latest on Homo naledi

Relatively complete skeletons from early human ancestors typically generate a ton of buzz in the popular media. None, however, has generated as much in the last 10 years as the finds of Homo naledi. The remains of at least 15 individuals have been unearthed within the Rising Star Cave System in South Africa since its discovery by cavers in 2013. In 2017, an additional three individuals were announced from a separate chamber in the cave. The finds show an interesting, and perplexing, mixture of traits that recall everything from Homo habilis to H. erectus and even Australopithecus.

Last fall, the President of our Student Anthropological Society here at UNCG, Cory Henderson (who was recently accepted to graduate school at Penn State), asked me if I could get in touch with a friend of mine, Dr. Zach Throckmorton, who is a member of the Rising Star team, to talk about Homo naledi. Zach generously agreed, and on Friday, April 7th the Department of Anthropology and Student Anthropological Society at UNCG hosted Zach and another Rising Star researcher, Dr. Chris Walker. The background to the Rising Star discovery and the rapid fire, open-access approach to research dissemination are well documented and controversial, and I'll leave it to the reader to delve into those issues. Here, I'll just summarize what I found to be particularly intriguing. First up was Zach, who is an expert on feet and discussed the post-cranial anatomy:

• H. naledi has long thumbs, just like modern humans (this is one of the features that gives us the ability to precisely manipulate objects with our hands). However, the fingers are somewhat curved.
• The torsion, or twisting, of the humeral shaft relative to the humeral head is odd in that it falls within a range of modern monkeys. 
• The lower limb, including the foot, appears to be more-or-less modern human-like. However, H. naledi was small--Zach estimates that the complete foot would have fit into a size 3 shoe. 
• So, overall, the upper limbs retain some features that may be adaptations for climbing, while the lower limbs share many similarities to modern humans. 

Chris followed with a discussion of growth and development in H. naledi:

• A majority (eight out of thirteen, to be exact) of the individuals from the cave for which age can be determined are juveniles. Most of the complete long bones are also from juveniles. 
• Based on the dental data, it seems that H. naledi followed a modern-human like growth trajectory. 
• The legs are very long relative to body size (which was pretty small, perhaps 147 cm and around 45 kg), but the intermembral index is human-like. This means that H. naledi had longer legs than would be expected for a hominin of its body size but they are not longer relative to their arm length than would be expected for a modern human. Such long legs may be an adaptation for efficient terrestrial bipedalism. 

The anatomy of H. naledi, and the provocative interpretation put forward by the Rising Star team for the assemblage's origin (the intentional disposal of the cadavers within the cave by other hominins), was even more puzzling because no one knew how old the fossils were. Based on their morphology, some estimated the fossils to be early Pleistocene in age (perhaps one or two million years old). A colleague who has seen the bones first hand told me that they didn't appear to be fossilized, which is difficult to accommodate with such an ancient date. Earlier this year the Rising Star team announced a much younger date of ~300,000 years. While deliberate placement of the bodies in the cave is perhaps more easily reconciled with a younger age, the brain size (less than half the size of a modern human) and the complexities of cave geology make this hypothesis far from demonstrated. Either way, this is extremely interesting, and I am looking forward to seeing where it goes...