Impostor phenomenon refers to an overwhelming feeling of intellectual fraudulence and affects individuals across a number of fields. Academia provides an environment in which these feelings can flourish, particularly within postgraduate students. In spite of the research exploring these feelings, we know little about how to reduce them in academia. Clinical research has identified guiding principles to assist those affected, particularly through mentorship. This paper describes a series of interventions for postgraduates adapted from clinical research. These four interventions identified impostor phenomenon and its consequences, explored disciplinary and academic literacies strategies, and taught postgraduate students how to read academic journal articles and use literacy strategies to write literature reviews. Parametric and nonparametric analyses show that impostor feelings reduced by 23% relative to a control group. This research suggests that programmes could use similar interventions in academic skill sets to help reduce impostor phenomenon feelings in their postgraduate students.

Impostor phenomenon refers to an overwhelming feeling of being an intellectual fraud despite evidence to the contrary and affects highly capable individuals in many fields, including those in postgraduate education. This project sought to answer the following question: in what ways do postgraduate students enrolled in a large, American institution experience impostor phenomenon during their postgraduate education? Interviews and a survey showed that the majority of the participants experienced impostor phenomenon, and that many of those feelings related to the participants feeling academically-unprepared, including concerns related to reading, writing, and discussing academic work. This paper explores this connection between impostor phenomenon and participants feeling like they lacked sufficient academic skill sets to succeed in their programmes. The results build a case for doing literacy work as a way to address impostor phenomenon among postgraduate students.

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The dominant quick‐test method of estimating soil lime requirements in the USA Corn Belt and adjacent area is the Shoemaker, McLean, Pratt (SMP) buffer method. This work was done to compare an improved Woodruff buffer with the SMP buffer to determine which most accurately estimated soil lime requirement. This study used a Ca(OH)2‐CaCl2 soil titration procedure and incubation of soils with finely ground, chemically pure CaCO3 to compare the accuracy of the original Woodruff procedure, the SMP single buffer procedure, and the new Woodruff procedure in estimating the lime requirements of 89 soil samples. The results supported 1961 findings by Ohio workers that the original Woodruff procedure drastically underestimated lime requirements. The results also supported the literature that the SMP procedure underestimates low lime requirements. The SMP tended to overestimate high lime requirements. Based upon the results of this study, the new Woodruff procedure was a better predictor of lime requirements than the SMP procedure.

Students face challenging texts and concepts across the disciplines in higher education, and many students lack the reading skills and strategies to make sense of them. The aim of the small study described in this article was to explore the benefits, if any, of the difficulty paper, a written formative assessment that asks students to explore their difficulties with challenging texts. An inductive analysis of student difficulty papers in a multidisciplinary “Great Works” course suggests that the paper encouraged students to address their confusion without dismissing it and helped students to model the processes of good reading. Findings also suggest that the assignment may be a useful tool to develop disciplinary habits of mind. The article concludes with an example of how educators might use the difficulty paper in science and mathematics courses.