Staff Reports

For that last nine years, the Indiana University-Purdue University Columbus Office of Student Research has invited students, faculty, staff and the public to campus for an exhibition of student research projects.

Julie Goodspeed-Chadwick, director of the office, had hoped for a special celebration of the 10th anniversary, but the COVID-19 outbreak necessitated a change of plans.

In the past, students created posters to display their research data and presented that information in a small group format to attendees.

This year, Goodspeed-Chadwick asked the students to record their presentations to be displayed alongside their posters on a web page.

This year’s online exhibition features the work of 22 students, including three from Jackson County, and 15 faculty mentors on 15 research projects.

Each team received a grant from the Office of Student Research to fund its project.

To earn a grant, students submitted project proposals, passed a vetting process by a review committee and then completed their projects with direction and guidance from a faculty mentor.

To learn more about the Office of Student Research and to view this year’s presentations, visit iupuc.edu/academics/research/student-research.

Descriptions of three projects involving Jackson County student researchers and their hometowns are:

Social judgments

of point-light displays

The high prevalence rate of autism spectrum disorder warrants research on the development of social perception in typical and atypical populations. Participants from IUPUC’s campus first completed two questionnaires examining their potential place on the autism spectrum, and then they watched a series of 75 videos displaying several emotions and body movements and made social judgments of emotionality, personality and gender for each video. The impact of this study will influence future research examining the development of social perception in children with and without ASD or at risk of developing ASD. (Victoria Ewing of Seymour)

Engaging paper and digital children’s books to support student understanding

This project explores how first grade students comprehended digital and paper texts. It also explored suggestions in connection with teaching early elementary students when utilizing paper and digital texts. This project will be published in Chapter 7 of the Handbook of Research on Literacy and Digital Technology Integration in Teacher Education. (Maycie Asher of Edinburgh, Payten Ewing of Greensburg and Kayla Pride of Brownstown)

Concept mapping Ted Hughes’ birthday letters

This presentation is the result of a culminating assignment in a unit on Ted Hughes’ poetry collection “Birthday Letters” in an undergraduate capstone English and women’s, gender and sexuality studies seminar. The presentation introduces the context of a signature assignment that intermixes national identities and what have become archetypal themes in Plath and Hughes studies, and it showcases the products of the assignments — concept maps, essentially tools of creative inquiry that promote critical thinking and assessment. (Sydney Berman of Seymour, Hanna Hodnett, Jessica Hurley and Natasha Kever, all of Columbus, and Madeline Robb of Indianapolis)