Current HDS Honors Projects

Simone Froley

Learning in the Social Multi-Arm Bandit: an Exploration of Joint Action and Reward-Seeking Behavior

Advisor: Gedeon Deak

Abstract: Social learning is enabled by joint action and the ability to accurately infer outcomes based on known prior events. However, interfering with joint action in dynamic environments may override any advantages that are generally granted to learning in a social context. Prior research indicates the need for a closer examination of how individual performance is implicated by diverging outcomes within groups. The present study used a variation of the Adrian et al. (2018) Joint Multi-Arm Bandit paradigm to determine how probabilistic outcomes affect decision making in a social condition where interaction partners receive conflicting feedback. Compared to an individual control group that did not involve unreliable external stimuli, we predicted that the social condition would exhibit relatively less effective decisions, lower scores, and suboptimal reward-seeking strategies. Results contradicted our hypotheses, demonstrating equal if not improved overall learning and performance in the social condition. Our findings suggest that individuals are able to weigh others’ actions flexibly to account for situations in which imitation is disadvantageous. Furthermore, delayed improvements in learning rate exhibited in the current task may reveal a process of selective social learning.

Keywords: multi-arm bandit, social learning, joint action, statistical inference

Susan Hou

Undergraduate Experiences and Responses to Recognition

Advisor: Stanley Lo (Biology)

Abstract: Undergraduate students pursuing degrees in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) must interact and negotiate with prevailing norms and practices within the disciplines, which are known to be influenced by dominant cultures. Socialization of the norms within STEM fields is critical for a student’s learning process as they cultivate their understanding and their own position. STEM identity provides a lens to examine the negotiations between students and the prevailing practices in STEM, analyzing individual agency and societal structures that constrain access and learning. Specifically, the purpose of this study is to examine how individual experiences contribute to the STEM identities of undergraduate students. Our research question is: How do students make sense of different experiences and navigate their identity trajectories in STEM?

This study combines previous theoretical frameworks on STEM identity, which includes three domains: recognition, interest, and competence. Each domain encompasses positive and negative individual experiences of students related to being recognized, becoming interested, or feeling competent. While the existing literature focuses on quantitative measurements of these three domains in relation to STEM identity, and highlighted the importance of recognition, this study aims to contribute to the literature through the addition of qualitative and narrative studies of individual experiences in all three domains of STEM identity.

Data were collected through semi-structured interviews with 29 participants from a summer-bridge program for incoming transfer students seeking STEM research experience. Participants were asked to describe academic experiences that made them feel recognized, interested, or competent in STEM and to elaborate on the impact of these experiences. Interviews were transcribed verbatim and analyzed using grounded theory as the qualitative methodology. In open coding, memos and in vivo codes were generated using participants’ own phrases that captured critical yet broad experiences and their meanings. In axial coding, categories and themes emerging from the data were recorded. In selective coding, data for each type of experiences and meaning related to the three identity domains were revisited to further refine the definitions of the codes.

Preliminary data analysis identified a variety of experiences and interpretations that contribute to the three domains of STEM identity. Student experiences often intersected with more than one domain. Surprisingly, similar or analogous experiences can lead to unexpectedly different or opposing effects on individual students. For example, a letter of recommendation was interpreted as a sign of positive recognition for some students, bolstering their confidence, while other students interpreted the letter as a formality and struggled to internalize the letter as recognition. These findings indicate the complex interactions between student identity and recognition, interest, and competence. The results have led to the development of a follow-up study, focusing specifically on identifying additional sociocultural factors that may contribute to the varied individual student responses to analogous events or experiences.

Kathryn Perez

Do Adolescents Misperceive Effort at Poor Learning

Advisor: Gail Heyman

Abstract: The purpose of the present study was to explore whether adolescents perceived study strategies that are more effortful (i.e., interleaved versus blocked) as poor learning and whether these study strategies differentially predicted learning outcomes. Participants included 44 fifth through eighth grade students from a private Catholic school. Participants had to learn bird categories using the Blocked and Interleaved study strategies. Students were then asked survey questions about each study strategy independently (i.e., their perceptions of effort and perceptions of learning). They were also asked forced-choice questions where they had to decide which was more effortful and which was better for learning. Finally, they took a brief test to assess learning. There were no significant differences between the study strategies for independent ratings or test performance. However, in the forced-choice response, adolescents (like adults) did rate Interleaved as being less effective for learning than Blocked. Future work is needed to determine whether these study strategies work similarly for adolescents as they do adults, however, we find some evidence to suggests that these strategies are misperceived in similar ways.

Keywords: mental effort, interleaving, adolescence, study strategies,