For the first time, the Division of Student Affairs and Academic Support is sponsoring three research projects during the 2025-26 academic year aimed at furthering how the division can best support and enhance the Gamecock student experience.
Associate Vice President for Assessment Pam Bowers will facilitate the inaugural group of SAAS Faculty Research Fellows, composed of John Grady, Jamil Johnson and Hengtao Tang.
John Grady
Grady is spearheading the project “Inclusive by design: Applying sport service practices to enhance campus inclusion and accessibility at USC.”
He currently serves as a Carolina Trustee professor for the Department of Sport and Entertainment Management within the College of Hospitality, Retail, and Sport Management. There his research focuses on the legal aspects of the business of sports, including accommodations for people with disabilities at sporting venues.
However, his research with the Division of Student Affairs and Academic Support will leave the sports realm behind while carrying over key concepts about designing accessible programming on a college campus.
“This project sort of takes my research one step closer to home at the campus level and says, ‘how can we take those best practices for stadium management and kind of innovate and apply them to the university setting to make the campus and its programs more accessible?’” Grady says.
The center of Grady's research will be finding ways to create accessible programming and consideration for students of all abilities using mainly the infrastructure that USC already has in place. By making intentional choices with that consideration front of mind, the university can be open and welcoming to a range of populations.
“To most people, access would mean elevators, ramps or signage. To me, access is much more than that. And to be truly accessible is to have programs that take into consideration the needs of people with disabilities, including our students,” he says. “If you think of accessibility as an asset and not as merely legal obligation to be met, you start to see the new opportunities it creates on our campus.”
Through the course of his research, Grady will work with the Carolina Experience and Director Amber Fallucca, culminating in recommendations and best practices that can be shared with campus partners. Together with Fallucca, Grady aims to explore how the Division of Student Affairs and Academic Support can continue to foster a great sense of belonging for students and craft a premium campus experience, borrowing from the premium experiences fans have come to expect in stadiums and arenas.
Jamil Johnson
Johnson will lead another research project focused on a particular aspect of the campus experience, titled “Student transition beyond the first year: Engagement in high-impact practices to promote career and experiential development.”
He currently works as both a clinical assistant professor in the Department of Leadership, Learning Design, and Inquiry within the College of Education and as scholar-in-residence for the National Resource Center for The First-Year Experience and Students in Transition. In both appointments, Johnson dedicates time to research on the first-year experience, African American male students and student affairs topics.
In his research with the division, Johnson will continue his research focuses with particular attention paid to first-generation students and their participation in high-impact practices.
The American Association of Colleges and Universities defines high-impact practices as programs “based on evidence of significant educational benefits for students who participate in them — including and especially those from demographic groups historically underserved by higher education. These practices take many different forms, depending on learner characteristics and on institutional priorities and contexts.” At USC, Johnson says key high-impact practices include University 101, student leadership positions, independent studies, research and study abroad opportunities, and those activities are tied to strong performance in a number of areas for students.
“If you look at the data with the students that participate in high-impact practices as a whole, the more students participate in these, they more likely they are to graduate,” Johnson says. “First-year students are more likely to be retained from the first year to the second year, and students who participate in high-impact practices in all years are more likely to gain post-baccalaureate success, more likely to start careers, more likely to pursue graduate study.”
However, Johnson is interested in separating out that data to better understand how first-generation students in particular are taking part. He says that first-generation students — defined by USC’s First-Generation Center as “any individual whose parents did not complete a bachelor’s degree” — are viewed from a deficit mindset.
“With first-generation students, I'm always thinking about ‘how can we flip the script?’ I'm very aware that when working with first-generation students, I don't want to be deficit, I always want to be asset-based. I always want to celebrate first generation students. And so a goal of this research is going to be to celebrate first generation students,” Johnson says.”
In researching how first-generation students are supported in pursuing high-impact practices, Johnson plans a two-tiered approach. First, he will set up roundtable discussions with first-generation students to understand their experiences — what works, where they could use more support and, importantly, where they have been successful in deepening their college experience. Those students will range in years, but the roundtables will be peer-led, employing student facilitators that Johnson and his research team select.
The next step will be one-on-one interviews, allowing students a more open format to detail their experiences.
Throughout the process, Johnson will partner will key stakeholders from across the university, who can use the findings to inform and boost how they support students in high-impact practices, including the First-Generation Center, TRIO Programs and the Ronald E. McNair Program, the Carolina Experience and the Center for Student Engagement.
Hengtao Tang
Tang, an associate professor also in the Department of Leadership, Learning Design, and Inquiry in the College of Education, will undertake research on “Navigating AI ethically: Empowering college students for responsible learning.”
He aims to better understand how modern students are currently using artificial intelligence (AI), namely Chat GPT, as a learning tool and create a framework for ethical usage. Tang says ethical use means students using AI to help further their work but never passing off an AI-generated response as their own, instead using their discernment skills to figure out how the AI content fits into the greater picture.
“Generative AI has been everywhere, created so everyone can use it. It has a lot of benefits, allowing students to find much more information than maybe than a search engine, and it’s more efficient to use,” he says. “But at the same time, it creates an issue about using their agency, whether they are assessing the solution provided by AI and also how they integrate that into their work.”
Tang also cited academic research from MIT led by Nataliya Kosmyna that concluded that people working with Chat GPT often exhibited lower brain activity, especially when copying and pasting results, compared to subjects working with a basic search engine or no external resources at all on the same assignments.
“We need to provide the training beyond the content and beyond the technology,” Tang says. “We need to give them some training and say ‘this is how you should treat AI as a learning partner or learning consultant, but not as something that can replace your own effort.’”
Tang plans to partner with the Student Success Center, Student Conduct and Academic Integrity and the Career Center throughout his project to understand the full picture of how students can continue working with AI in a way that boosts their learning, adheres to academic integrity guidelines and ultimately makes them more competitive applicants as they apply to jobs.
Through the course of this project, Tang hopes to develop training materials that focus on using generative AI as a study partner, rather than a replacement for student effort. In the fall, he will create training materials, including interactive assessments and video tutorials. Beginning in the spring, Tang plans to start disseminating his training with the help of campus partners like the Student Success Center and collect data on how learners are working through his modules.