2015 — 2020 |
Bogue, Scott Udit, Andrew (co-PI) [⬀] Scheel, Janet North, Gretchen Buckmire, Ron Levitan, Carmel |
N/AActivity Code Description: No activity code was retrieved: click on the grant title for more information |
Cosmos: Creating Opportunities in Science and Mathematics For Occidental Students
The United States faces a national need for a significant increase of the number of American scientists in the workforce. This NSF Scholarships in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (S-STEM) project at Occidental College will address this need and contribute to the national effort to produce more STEM graduates by providing financial, academic, and personal support to academically-talented and financially needy students majoring in the STEM fields of Biology, Biochemistry, Chemistry, Cognitive Science, Geology, Mathematics and Physics. The COSMOS project (Creating Opportunities in Science and Mathematics for Occidental Students) will support three annual cohorts of eight sophomore students who are academically talented but in financial need with scholarship awards of up to $8,000 each per year. The primary focal points of COSMOS are recruitment, retention and leadership development of students who major and graduate in the aforementioned STEM disciplines. The COSMOS program will increase opportunities for these students to enter the STEM workforce as leaders by enhancing the academic, advising and research infrastructures to mentor students at the institution from their first year as undergraduates through graduation. COSMOS leverages federal funds to support students and broaden participation in high-impact practices at Occidental such as summer undergraduate research opportunities, a first-year seminar course in STEM content, supplemental instruction, community outreach and active mentoring by specially selected and trained faculty and student peers.
The COSMOS initiatives will work in concert with existing and strengthened support services at Occidental. The investigators will research and assess the effectiveness of the various components of the project, considered individually and working in combination with each other. Their findings will add to the overall knowledge base of STEM education and will help create a national model leading to productive student intervention strategies, which can be shared with and replicated at other institutions. The investigations will provide new insights related to understanding and improving successes of underrepresented and/or low income students, thereby broadening participation by expanding diversity in STEM fields, especially at liberal arts colleges. COSMOS has a robust evaluation plan with formative and summative components, organized around a clear logic model and implemented by an independent evaluator. There are multiple articulated metrics, outcomes and quantifiable data that will be used to measure overall success of COSMOS in increasing the number and diversity of academically talented and financially disadvantage majors and graduates in STEM fields at Occidental College.
|
0.915 |
2015 — 2018 |
Schell, Anne Levitan, Carmel Sherman, Aleksandra [⬀] Shelton, Michael (co-PI) [⬀] |
N/AActivity Code Description: No activity code was retrieved: click on the grant title for more information |
Mri: Acquisition of a Shared Mobile Eeg For Research and Undergraduate Training At Occidental College
Scientists are increasingly using neural recording techniques to study how and when perceptual, cognitive, and emotional processes unfold in the brain over time. Electroencephalography (EEG) is a non-invasive technique for measuring electrical activity of the brain, with extraordinary temporal precision. With the support from the Major Research Instrumentation Program, the investigators will purchase a state-of-the-art high-density, mobile EEG system for shared use by the faculty and students at Occidental College. The mobility of the EEG system provides an exciting opportunity to investigate perception and cognition both within a laboratory and in naturalistic settings outside of the laboratory. The acquisition of this system will also allow the investigators to foster unique research opportunities for a diverse group of students at the undergraduate level. Faculty and students will be involved in a dynamic, interdisciplinary research program, with investigations of topics such as multisensory perception, time perception, art perception, attention, emotional processing, language processing, and music cognition. The system will also serve as a key instrument for establishing undergraduate training in the cognitive neurosciences at Occidental College and will be integrated into coursework. Participating students will develop a broad range of skills relevant for both graduate study and participation in the STEM workforce, including strong data analytic and computational skills. As the student population at Occidental College is very diverse, the investigators aim to broaden participation of underrepresented groups in the sciences.
The investigators involved will launch several research programs in a broad range of areas within the cognitive sciences, with the goal of expanding opportunities for student research and for multi-disciplinary collaboration across the College. Research project 1 aims to understand how sound can be used to synchronize neural activity across a pair of individuals and whether and how neural synchronization causally influences behavioral coordination. Research project 2 will investigate art perception to understand a) how internal states such as current mood may systematically drive attention toward specific features of an artwork, b) what type of neural response is associated with profound aesthetic experiences from viewing art compared to viewing non-art, and c) the extent to which the neural response associated with aesthetic experience is similar across art modality (e.g. visual art, music, literature). Research project 3 will explore mechanisms underlying temporal perception and how information is transferred across sensory modalities, to address fundamental questions about the multisensory organization of the brain, and will help provide a better understanding of how the brain represents time. Research project 4 will compare the time course of language processing and syllabic stress encoding in English and Spanish speakers to examine processing differences between heritage speakers and monolingual speakers of Spanish. Research project 5 aims to understand the role of consciousness in emotional processing by simultaneously measuring skin conductance response, cortical event-related potentials, and conscious expectancy of an unconditioned stimulus in a backward masking paradigm.
|
0.915 |