Congratulations to the three Ed Psych Doctoral students who have been awarded Doctoral Student Research Grants (DSRG) for 2021! The DSRG is a competitive research grant which awards up to $1,500 for travel, payments to human research subjects, supplies, and other expenses.

We have provided each recipient’s research title and abstract below. We hope this initiates scholarly communication between recipients and other scholars. Make sure to follow our blog to stay up to date on their research! Add a comment below if you are interested in connecting with any of these three researchers.

Robin Harvey

Robin Harvey

Research Title: Learning to write in L2 Chinese: A longitudinal study of writing development in fourth grade Chinese immersion classrooms 

Abstract: Children learning Chinese must learn to express themselves in writing. Free writing is an activity designed to allow students to call on all of their linguistic resources (characters, Pinyin, pictures, and English) to express their thoughts in writing without concern for language forms. 

This study investigates the longitudinal growth in free writing abilities of L2 Chinese learners in a Chinese immersion school over one school year. Seventy fourth-grade students engaged in free writing as part of their standard curriculum. Four free writes have been collected and will be transcribed and coded using CHAT formatting for analysis by CLAN software (MacWhinney, 2000, 2014). 

Free writes will be analyzed for vocabulary diversity, linguistic complexity, use of English forms, and length of texts. We hypothesize that vocabulary diversity, linguistic complexity, that lengths of texts will increase and that use of English will decrease over the course of the school year.

Jessica Brodsky

Jessica Brodsky

Research Title: Assessing the Efficacy of an Online Curriculum for Improving Undergraduates’ Fact-checking Skills and Motivation

Abstract: The proposed study examines the efficacy of an online curriculum for increasing undergraduates’ fact-checking skills and their motivation to fact-checking online content. I will use assessment data from a general education civics course that implemented an online curriculum teaching fact-checking strategies relying on lateral reading (i.e., leaving the initial content to verify claims and investigate sources). The curriculum featured three online homework assignments which used videos and practice problems with feedback to teach students to look for trusted work, find the original, investigate the source, and circle back to the beginning. Pretests and posttests assessed students’ ability and motivation to fact-check online information using lateral reading. Findings will inform the development of fact-checking instruction at the college level and further understanding of how motivational factors influence students’ fact-checking behaviors.

Nicole Zapparrata

Nicole M. Zapparrata

Research Title: Is there evidence of slower processing speed in Autism Spectrum Disorder? A meta-analytic investigation

Abstract: The proposed study is a meta-analysis on reaction time data in autistic individuals compared to neurotypical age-matched controls. Robust Variance Estimation will be used to discover whether autistic individuals have slower reaction times by calculating an overall effect size estimate (Hedge’s g). To account for variation, moderators, including task-type and stimuli (social; linguistic), will be analyzed using meta-regression. Additionally, study-participant grand mean-centered age will be used as a covariate in the analysis. If autistic individuals have slower processing speeds than neurotypical controls, this process may be a higher-order mechanism that underlies the cognitive profile and impaired domains in autism.

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