Never mind!

[asterroc]

I had a Googling question which I found the answer to right after making the post, but keeping this up for posterity.



I am trying to find a link to an article on black student retention that I tweeted about a while ago, either from my private account @zandperl, or my personally identifying account which is my first initial and last name (no punctuation). I found the article originally from an academic source, perhaps @Comm_College or @massteacher. The article was summarizing a larger study at some large state university or college, perhaps in California, where they studied the retention of black students (and I'm pretty sure they said "black" not "African American") in either the sciences or physics specifically, and did find a correlation between the retention of black students within the field of science (or physics) and whether the black students had taken courses with black faculty/professors. A few other points I can recall were that they also looked at the retention of women students and whether they'd taken courses with women faculty and they found no correlation there (surprisingly to me); that they were unable to determine whether there was any relationship between black student retention and black TAs since TAs names were not kept on record; and that they also found that black faculty had a higher percentage of their students as black, indicating that there was a selection effect of which faculty the black students preferred to take courses with. I think the study was also published in a peer-reviewed journal or a publication of a major professional organization (such as the American Physical Society), but the link was to a non-peer-reviewed summary of it in I think some academic blog or academic news site.

Help me Google senseis!

So for my solution, I took that exact block of text I typed above originally in nearly stream-of-consciousness style, cut out all the fluff, kept the keywords, except I omitted any keywords I wasn't certain about (i.e., physics), and that left me with the following block of text.

article on black student retention academic study at some large state university or college, sciences or physics correlation between the retention of black students within the field of science and whether the black students had taken courses with black faculty/professors. retention of women students and whether they'd taken courses with women faculty and they found no correlation there teaching assistants since TAs names were not kept on record; black faculty had a higher percentage of their students as black, indicating that there was a selection effect of which faculty the black students preferred to take courses with.

I threw that entire block of text - yes, the WHOLE mess of it - into Google as is (including odd punctuation, no grammar, and some extra spaces that LJ strips), and the third hit was the article that I wanted.