2001-2002 Undergraduate Research Award Winners
Justina Egan and Jessica Turos
Justina Egan is a psychology major. During the past three years, in addition to completing her thesis, "The Relationship between Religiosity and Risk-Taking Behaviors," spring 2000-spring 2002, Justina, has worked closely with faculty in the college's Center for Organizational Research and Evaluation (CORE):
In conjunction with Drs. Carl Kallgren, associate professor of psychology and CORE administrative director, and Kimberly Skarupski, assistant professor of psychology and CORE research director, Justina has been involved in the following research projects:
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Teen Pregnancy Bibliography, fall 1998-fall 2000. Justina was responsible for organizing, updating, and supervising others while assembling a bibliography of over 500 articles on adolescent pregnancy prevention. See http://www.pserie.psu.edu/hss/core/index.htm
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Teenage Pregnancy Prevention Services Inventory, fall 1999. Justina verified data and proofed parts of the manuscript for this comprehensive inventory of all adolescent pregnancy prevention service providers in Erie County.
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Survey of Religious Institutions and teenage pregnancy prevention in Erie County, 1999-present. This is a survey of religious institutions and their role in preventing teenage pregnancy. Justina came up with the idea for this important project and assumed primary responsibility for all aspects of the study. Justina designed the survey instrument, assembled a mailing list of over 300 religious institutions in Erie County, supervised the mailing, tracked all responses, and entered and analyzed the data. She and Dr. Kallgren are currently preparing the manuscript for publication. Despite the fact that most people believe religious institutions should play an important role in sexuality education and pregnancy prevention in teens, this study is the first to examine the issue empirically.
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Meta-analysis of the Teen Pregnancy Bibliography, summer 2000-summer 2001. Justina reviewed the entire bibliography to determine how many articles met the minimum criteria for inclusion in a meta-analysis (empirical articles with comparison groups).
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Erie School District, Teen Parenting Program, fall 2000. As part of a statewide evaluation of teen parenting programs, Justina conducted extensive telephone interviews with former clients of the Erie School District's Teen Parenting Program.
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JFK Senior Center Evaluation, spring 2000. As a pilot study for this project, Justina conducted face-to-face interviews with participants at the Martin Luther King Senior Center. Subsequently, she conducted interviews over a nine-month period at the JFK Senior Center. The interviews were approximately forty-five minutes long and covered issues such as health, diet, exercise, and socialization. Justina was also responsible for entering all of the data.
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National Institute on Aging grant to Dr. Skarupski: "Health Status of African Americans in Nursing Homes," spring 2000-fall 2000. Justina performed a major portion of the data manipulation.
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Housing Authority Drug Elimination Program Resident Survey, summer 2000 and summer 2001. This was a survey of public housing residents and their sense of neighborhood safety including drug use, gang activity, vandalism/graffiti, and crime. During summer 2000, Justina was a telephone and door-to-door interviewer and assisted with other aspects of the study. During summer 2001, she was the project director and supervised six interviewers who were responsible for doing mailings, telephone interviews, and door-to-door interviews. Justina supervised data entry and analysis, kept track of the budget for the project, and reviewed the final report to the Housing Authority.
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Abstinence Program Evaluation at Ft. LeBoeuf High School, spring 2000 and spring 2001. This was a statewide survey of abstinence programs being conducted by Ed Smith, P.H., a faculty affiliate of CORE based in University Park. Justina was the project director for these brief assessments of LeBoeuf High School students and their sexual beliefs and behaviors. She organized both data collection periods, including recruiting, and hiring and supervising the research assistants who administered the surveys to the classrooms.
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Perseus House/National Study of violence prevention program, summer 2001. CORE was asked to provide data analysis and interpretation of the data from this year-long longitudinal study of a violence prevention program at two local public schools. Justina was one of the primary investigators responsible for cleaning and analyzing this very complicated, dirty dataset.
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Transitional Living Center (TLC), Spring 2000 -present. TLC is a year-long comprehensive residential program for pregnant and parenting teens. CORE designed and is now beginning to collect data for an outcome study comparing approximately thirty past and present clients of TLC with thirty similar pregnant and parenting teens who did not enter the TLC program. This will be the first published study of a residential treatment program like TLC that includes a comparison group. Justina was involved in developing the interview protocols for the study.
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Healthy Families Program (HFP) of TLC, spring 2000 -present. CORE helped the TLC staff write a grant proposal to the Children's Trust Fund for $150,000 for three years to conduct a step-down program for TLC. With Justina as primary investigator, CORE is responsible for conducting the process and outcome evaluation for the project. She was instrumental in the design of the data collection forms for home visits and weekly parenting sessions, as well as the archival data collection forms used to collect data from client files. Justina has been the researcher who has performed the home visits and observations of the parenting sessions, as well as the archival data collection.
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Before joining CORE in fall 1998, Justina was involved in research projects with Dr. Charisse Nixon, lecturer in psychology, and Dawn Blasko, associate professor of psychology. While working for Dr. Nixon, Justina coded videotapes for developmentally appropriate behaviors by toddlers. She assisted Dr. Blasko in cognitive research on metaphor comprehension.
Justina has had two summer research grants from Penn State Erie and a grant during the school year to conduct her thesis research. She has also received two scholarships for academic merit.
Jessica Turos is a psychology major. She has been involved in research since her first year at the college when she conducted an observational research project in her honors introductory psychology class. Shortly after that, she became involved in the research laboratory of Dr. Dawn Blasko, associate professor of psychology, where she has been involved in some capacity ever since. Jessica has amassed an impressive record in her three and one-half years.
As part of the cognitive neuroscience lab supervised by Dr. Blasko and Dr. Victoria Kazmerski, associate professor of psychology, she has been involved in at least three different research projects including work on language processing and working memory, sentence understanding in the brain using ERP methodology, and the influence of handedness on nonliteral language comprehension. This work has lead to regional, national and international conference presentations.
At the same time that she has been working in the cognitive neuroscience lab she has also been involved in a large interdisciplinary research project on the training of spatial skills using the Web that we call VIZ. This project involves Kathy Holliday-Darr, lecturer in engineering, and Carla Torgerson, instructional designer. Jessica has been involved from the start. She was part of interdisciplinary teams of students who took part in a course on educational software design. In this course, Jessica emerged as the leader of a team of mostly engineering students and created several ideas for "games" to enhance spatial skills.
In her first research project, Jessica, along with partner Amanda Ervin, conducted a study to test the graphic images that were intended to use on the Web. Completely on her own, Jessica learned to program the experimenter generator E-prime, in order to present graphic images for a paper folding and mental rotation task. She then tested male and female college students and analyzed the results. Her most important finding was that linear perspective facilitated processing and we used her recommendations for the site. In her second research project involved with VIZ, Jessica studied the influence of type of training and effects of gender on improvement in the mental rotation task. One highlight of that study was that students did improve from self-training on the site nearly as much as from training in the lab. Obviously, this has major implications for Web-based education. This led to two presentations and a publication in the Behrend Psychology Journal.
Jessica recently analyzed data from her thesis project. This was a very ambitious undertaking for an undergraduate. Jessica pre-tested a large number of undergraduates on cognitive variables theoretically related to performance anxiety on math and technology. She then conducted an anxiety intervention workshop with students who tested high on math and computer anxiety. Jessica designed the intervention and implemented it on her own, thereby, demonstrating a degree of self-motivation, organizational skill, and theoretical development that is practically unheard of in an undergraduate student. The study is expected to be publishable, thereby adding to Jessica's already impressive research record.
In addition to her considerable involvement in research, it is important to note that Jessica has excelled academically. In addition, she has served in multiple leadership roles in the college, including acting as president of the Psychology Club and Psi Chi, the National Honor Society in psychology. Jessica has also worked in the counseling office and is currently doing an internship in student affairs. Her sense of community service is next to none. For example, she has helped to develop and mentor in the psychology first-year seminar for the past two years and has provided research training and tutoring for high school students at the Northwest Collegiate Academy and is now involved in a mentoring program for at-risk middle school students.