By MARTY LEVINE
Leo Omid Schumann, who started this month as director of action research — the first one — in the provost’s office, is dedicated to studying why some students persevere and others give up.
“I became a social psychologist because I wanted to understand what keeps people engaged when they encounter struggle, and why others disengage even when the stakes are high,” he explained.
His own family highly valued education — so much so that his parents fled with Schumann and his siblings from the 1978 revolution in Iran. Later, when Schumann was a professor at Stanford, he co-founded the College Transition Collaborative, which studied interventions to increase “belonging” across 22 higher education institutions.
At Stanford itself, they experimented with changing the letter warning students they had entered academic probation, after finding that “message intended was not message received,” Schumann said. While Stanford had hoped their letter would say, “We are here to support you,” students who received this notice too often felt “ashamed, like they wanted to hide,” they told researchers.
A revised version of the letter, offering resources to help students and including quotes from others who had successfully passed out of academic probation, resulted in 40 percent more recipients seeing an advisor and ultimately having success. And true success, Schumann noted, came with institutional change — when faculty had internalized this message and were able to pass it directly to students.
What makes some students think their first bad grade is a negative verdict on their futures, and others conclude that they just need more or better tools to succeed? Everyone has heard of “vicious cycles,” of bad leading to worse, but also possible, he said, are “virtuous cycles,” where students rise to the occasion.
“I want to identify these actual moments when these students ask these actual questions” that lead to disengagement — the “flight” in “fight or flight.”
“What if we could mitigate that? Belonging … what is it and how do we measure it? As best as I can describe it, belonging is the individual response or feeling that you are cared for and valued.” But it is actually best detected, he admitted, not by its presence, but by its absence. “It’s kind of like not being able to take a breath. You’re not sure what is causing that state. You just know that you can’t focus.”
If you believe you can grow — have a “growth mindset,” he said — you can get more out of education, leading to a better job. However, just telling people “You belong” does not help them belong. Putting up billboards on campus with the message “You belong” only reinforces some students’ sense that they must not have belonged in the first place.
“How is it that people will cross borders, endure danger and uproot their lives for access to these institutions — and yet once enrolled, so many drift away from them?” Schumann asked. “The answer is not simply academic ability. These numbers reflect students encountering moments when the institution’s signals do not support their continued engagement. Students hit barriers the system doesn’t see, experience uncertainty it doesn’t address and gradually reach what I call the space between struggle and surrender: the moment when continuing feels futile and disengagement feels logical. Understanding and improving those moments has been at the heart of my work.”
Schumann spent 2016-19 at the Learning Research and Development Center (as Omid Fotuhi, before recently becoming a U.S. citizen and changing his name). After leaving for five years’ work in commercial concerns, Schumann is now back at Pitt. As director of action research, he said, “I’m a bridge maker,” charged with connecting faculty researchers to resources, to connecting individual theories to institutional data, and bringing people together to join their approaches.
Too often, he noted, “a solution patches the problem but the root cause, the institution, needs to be fixed. The research is published, but that is not enough. System change is the important part.”
Action research, he explained, means to “plan a theory-informed response to a specific problem; act by implementing a psychologically attuned intervention; observe what the findings show; and reflect on what actually changed. Then repeat. When done well, the cycle builds institutional learning and ensures that improvements accumulate rather than appearing as isolated initiatives. It allows a university to see itself honestly — what is working, for whom, and under what conditions.
“And at Pitt, we have already begun to see what this kind of work can make possible.” In his Pitt work, Schumann said, “I’ve partnered with colleagues across the University to redesign elements of the undergraduate transition experience, strengthen approaches to advising and deepen our understanding of student belonging and persistence. We’ve piloted interventions, built early-stage evaluation systems and begun developing a more unified picture of where students thrive and where they struggle.
“My intention in this new role is to take those early efforts and build them into a coherent, institution-wide learning system: one that supports evidence-based decision-making, rapid-cycle testing and shared ownership of student success across units.
“The goal is simple: make Pitt a place where students feel supported from the moment they arrive to the moment they complete, and where the institution itself continuously learns how to get better at supporting them.”
The toughest but most life-changing learning, he believes, takes place when the student is able to live at “the frontiers of your abilities. Really smart people are OK with feeling psychologically not OK. That’s when the best learning happens. It’s a process we’re going to have to connect to.”
Marty Levine is a staff writer for the University Times. Reach him at martyl@pitt.edu or 412-758-4859.
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