Hey, y’all!           I’m Alex C. Lange (they/them). I am the new Editor for the AERA Division J blog. I am grateful to Dr. Jenny Lee for extending this opportunity to me, and I am jazzed for the chance to shape some generative scholarly dialogue through this blog. I am also delighted to have Martha Sesteaga (she/her/ella) join me as a Managing Editor for the blog.           A bit about me: I am an assistant professor of higher education at Colorado State University-Ft. Collins, which resides on the lands of the Arapaho, Cheyenne, and Ute Nations and peoples. I teach students in our Higher Education Leadership Ph.D. program. My research interests include student learning and development, college teaching, and LGBTQ+ studies in higher education. I often write about these topics, especially teaching and learning, through my blog on Medium ( Medium link ).           What do I hope to do wi...

Dr. Yizhen Wan   Highlights A fall 2020 survey by iimedia shows that the number of new Chinese undergraduate students to US higher education institutions (USHEIs) dropped 90-95% in the academic year of 2020-2021 compared to that in 2019-2020. UK higher education institutions (UKHEIs) exerted effective measures to attract Chinese students in the last two decades, resulting in the scale for recruitment of new Chinese students by UKHEIs was about eight times as that by USHEIs in 2019. Cancellation of SAT test sites in China by US College Board, which forces Chinese students to have SAT test abroad, was the most important reason causing a sharp decrease of Chinese students to USHEIs in 2016-2019. Several practical measures are proposed in this article for USHEIs’ consideration to turn round the adverse situation. The Number of Chinese Students in US and UK in 2019 About 644,200 Chinese undergraduate students (CUSs) pursued higher education abroad in the academic year of (AY) 2019-2020...

Jia Zheng , PhD Student of the Higher Education, Student Affairs and International Education Policy Program, University of Maryland The Open Doors Report marked a fourth consecutive year of decline in international student enrollment since 2016 , with the number of international undergraduate students dropping by 2.4% during the 2018-2019 academic year (Institute of International Education [IIE], 2020). China remained the top leading country of origin for international students, constituting 35% of the total number of international students in U.S. universities (IIE , 2020). To attract more prospective Chinese international undergraduate students , an increasing number of private institutions in the U.S. are accepting the Chinese National College Entrance Exam scores (Gaokao scores) in lieu of SAT or ACT scores (Bennett, 2019).  Although Gaokao, SAT, and ACT are all high-stake standardized tests, they differ in  several areas. Gaokao is a 2-day college entrance exam adminis...

Lauren Storz is an Academic Experience Analyst on the Academic Technology Design Team, and a PhD student in cultural anthropology at CU Boulder.  Namita Mehta is a Learning Experience Designer with the Office of Information Technology at CU Boulder.  She has over 15 years of experience in education and holds an Ed.D in Leadership for Educational Equity.     Wicked problems are those that have interdependent factors to consider. To solve these complex problems in technology-mediated teaching and learning, we emphasize the importance of understanding context and the systems at play to respond to human needs in the first blog post. Developing a clear and focused problem statement is essential to guide a research project, and mixed research methods can be used to understand and continually refine problem statements throughout the research process.  In this post, we want to expand on how we use mixed research methods to achieve a human-centered approach– in other wo...