The following students in the College of Liberal Arts and Human Sciences participated in the 2022 Dennis Dean Undergraduate Research and Creative Scholarship Conference, which took place April 29 in the Squires Student Center:

  • Ursilia Beckles, English, presented “The Socioemotional Development of Minority Women in Majority White Evangelical Space”; her faculty mentors were Katie Carmichael, Department of English, and Tameka Grimes, School of Education.
  • Christine Berry, Human Development and Psychology, and Katherine D’Ercole presented “Relations Between Parents’ and Children’s Math Anxiety along with Children’s Math Avoidance and Math Performance in Elementary School”; their mentors were Department of Human Development and Family Science faculty member Caroline Hornburg and graduate student Jisun Kim.
  • Sara Carter, International Relations and Religion and Culture, presented “Eins, Dos, Three! Investigating Language Inhibition in Trilingual Students”; her faculty mentor was Abby Walker, Department of English.
  • Carter and Jessie Yu presented “Ideologies of Intelligibility in Subtitling”; their faculty mentor was Walker.
  • Madeline Eberhardt, English, and Beckles presented “This City Will Be Chocolate at the End of the Day”: Racial Identity, Colorism, and Generational Change in the New Orleans Black and Creole Communities”; their faculty mentors were Carmichael and Natalie Cook, Public Health.
  • Vera Gliga, International Relations, Lauren Maunder, National Security and Foreign Affairs, and others presented “Investigating Barriers to Sustainable Behaviors at Virginia Tech.”
  • Will Heltzel, International Relations and French, and Joe Harrison presented “Accommodation in Colloquial Singapore English”; their faculty mentors were Ming Chew Teo, Department of Modern and Classical Languages and Literatures, and Walker.
  • Charlotte Koogle, Human Development, and Adam Bowen presented “A Study into Perceived Dialect Boundaries of Southwest Virginia”; their faculty mentor was Walker.
  • Human Development students Jiayuan Dong, Jisun Kim, Ava Morris, Julia Place, and Shuqi Yu, with Beckles and others presented “Sing, Act, and Dance with Robots: A Child-Robot Musical Theater Afterschool Program for STEAM”; their faculty mentors were Koeun Choi, Department of Human Development and Family Science, and Myounghoon Jeon.
  • Human Development students Ava Morris, Julia Place, and Laura Zhang, with Beckles and other presented “Q&A on Zoom for Preschoolers: The Impact of On-screen Partners’ Questions on Preschoolers’ Word Learning and Memory of Content from Shared Book Reading over Video Chat”; their faculty mentor was Choi.
  • Hannah Madren, Human Development, presented “NOVA Natives vs. Other VA Natives: Perceptual Dialectology in Virginia”; her faculty mentor was Walker.
  • Kaitlyn Rasnick, Human Development, Gwen Roman, Childhood Pre-Education, and Hailey Reid presented “The Role of Parental Age as a Predictor of Maternal Sensitivity in Early Childhood”; their faculty mentors were Cynthia Smith, Department of Human Development and Family Science; Meredith Atanasio, Diana Devine, Nari Kang.
  • Kate Schiller, Political Science, presented “Fossil Capital’s Perpetual Cycle”; her faculty mentor was Jennifer Lawrence, Department of Political Science.
  • Jolee Sloss, Human Development and Psychology, Abigail Frye, and Olivia Salazar presented “Regulation Moderates the Association Between Vocabulary and Externalizing Behavior in Early Childhood.”
  • Hannah Upson, Political Science, presented “When the Right to Access (Life) Becomes a Burden": Accessibility to Public Health for Disabled People in Virginia during the COVID-19 Pandemic”; her faculty mentors were Monique Dufour, Department of History, and Ashley Shew, Department of Science, Technology, and Society.
  • Kathleen Walker, Creative Writing, presented “‘The Ability to Speak Does Not Make You Intelligent’: Dialect, Stereotypes, and Othering in Star Wars Episode I – The Phantom Menace”; her faculty mentor was Walker.

Abstracts can be found here. Ursilia Beckles was the winner of the Karen Roberto Award for Research in the Social Sciences. Sara Carter was tied for Third Place for the ICTAD Adaptive Brain and Behavior Award. All award winners are posted here.