Behavioral and Social Sciences

Our overall goal for this project is to assess the effectiveness of 3D printed fidget toys in the classroom as a method of cost effective classroom attentiveness management. Our goal this school year was to assess which 3D printable fidget toys, among those that are freely available online, were the most effective in terms of cost, material requirement, time to ... Read More

Access to health care impacts many people nationwide, as it restricts their ability to solve their health concerns. People who have the highest risk of a lack of access include people who are uninsured, people a part of a specific social class, a minority that lives in a poor state, or a person belonging to a specific political party. The ... Read More

There are many factors that can impact an individuals’ health, such as proximity to services, access to nature, occupational opportunities, and more. It was hypothesized that factors such as population density, education, civilian labor force, poverty, mortality, public transportation, air quality, and unemployment rates differ between urban and rural areas and influence longevity in humans. However, previous research dove deeper ... Read More

My SIR project analyzes the ways in which race intersects with and determines postgraduate success of young adults in the U.S. Previously, I studied the ways that Affirmative Action, Affirmative Action Bans, HBCUs and other factors affect the overall percentage of African American Students (Black) attending 4-year public institutions in America. I found that most of these variables had no ... Read More

After noting a lack of engagement and representation on the IMSA YouTube channel and researching existing science content, we produced an educational video segment for the channel about the brain, based on student surveys. After capturing analytics before and after, we analyzed the change in the channel and denoted this change to the topic, format, and production of our content. ... Read More

The purpose of this research paper is to identify the role of the racial makeup in American public schools has on educational outcomes. Current literature explains how low socioeconomic and academic resources create a negative compounded effect. Due to systematic disadvantages, minorities are less likely to graduate from high school and attend college. This project hypothesizes that even when controlling ... Read More

Self-determination theory (SDT) is a mega-theory about motivation. Basic Psychological Need Theory (BPNT), a sub-theory of SDT, claims that motivation is fostered when all three basic psychological needs - autonomy, competence, and relatedness - are satisfied. With COVID-19, the search for designing effective online learning tools has become more important than ever. Also, because students in higher education are more ... Read More

First-generation college student status is yet another identity that contributes to postsecondary performance of an individual in the United States. Though enrollment of first-generation college students has substantially increased in the past years, the populace is still privy to vulnerabilities concerning successful performance within and post collegiate studies. Typically, American society tends to consider first-generation college students as part of ... Read More

This project is a continuation of a project of the same name from the previous year. Last year’s project failed to find correlations between the effects of the pandemic and trends in Freedom Scores, as measures by Freedom House’s Freedom in the World (FIW) index. However, given that the pandemic continues to change in its nature, and given that more ... Read More

In preclinical animal data, rodents that show a high locomotor activity response (HR) in a novel environment are more sensitive to rewarding drugs than those with a low locomotor response (LR). Thus, locomotor response to novelty is suggested to reflect trait sensation seeking in humans which is also positively related to drug reward. This study investigates whether the preclinical data ... Read More

This project builds off of the results of “The Impact of Women on Annual Household Income per County” (Sirais & Venkatraman 2021), which explored the ways that gender roles affected financial wellbeing. The study will explore possible correlations between marital status and average annual household income on a county-level. By compiling datasets from the United States census, the project will ... Read More