Undergraduate Research and Creative Activities Journal

This research project examines the history of women’s involvement in internships. It looks at how women used internships to break into higher paying non-traditionally feminine employment while alsodiscussing the problems that interns encountered with sexual harassment.This project explores the rhetoric that allowed for interns to be unpaid and unprotected against discrimination throughout the 20th century. Through examining the rhetoric surroundinginternships in the 20th century, this paper found that the framing of interns as students, rather than as workers, caused interns to be excluded from employee status and left them without legal protectionfrom sexual harassment.

Goodreads elevates the user to a level of content producer, which increases student engagement with literature. As all themembers within the group are simultaneously promoted in statusand begin developing relationships, they create trust and are more willing to take book recommendations from each other, tying in the readers’ advisory component of the site. As a result, Goodreads users are being encouraged to read novels recommended by their peers and are given autonomy to choose based off trusted recommendations. The combination of autonomy and connection that Goodreads offers creates not only a more culturally relevant classroom, but one filled with students more likely to see being a reader as part of their identity significant.

This research examines why Black women pole dance and how their participation contributes to building self-confidence andself-efficacy. This study demonstrates how Black women resisted and created spaces for Black women to be empowered and seethemselves represented within the pole community. This research explored the ways and to what extent Black women can explore their sexuality through pole dancing as they oppose societal perceptions of Black women as hypersexual beings. I analyzedwhether academic literature on Black families aligned with how family members of Black pole dancers received and acceptedtheir involvement.

In the past two decades, remittances have overtaken official development assistance to developing countries while eclipsingother vehicles of development such as foreign direct investment. This begs the question of how these multinational transfers between households are affecting the role of governments in matterspertaining to poverty alleviation. This project will answer this question by analyzing what the effects of remittances and levels of democracy have on government social spending in CentralAmerican countries. This project hypothesizes that as remittancesincrease, the level of social spending in those countries will decrease and that this effect will be stronger in more autocraticsocieties.

Latinx students currently make up a large portion of the K-12 student population in the U.S. Because the Latinx population is the fastest-growing ethnic minority in the U.S., it is critical to address the persistent educational achievement gap between Latinx students and White students, or the future of the U.S. economy will suffer. Many scholars in the field of educational studies have suggested including more culturally relevant pedagogy in K-12 education. Culturally relevant ethnic studies have been shown to boost academic success and student engagement among K-12Latinx students, but more research must be done. This study examines the impact of an ethnic studies course, Mexican-AmericanLiterature, on a Latinx student in a Southern California high school and compares this to the narrative of a student who has never taken an ethnic studies course. The results show that both studentsbelieve that ethnic studies pedagogy can effectively improve student classroom engagement in K-12 education. The student in Mexican-American Literature expressed feeling more engaged in this class than in most of the other classes in his K-12 experience, and the other student expressed that she would have wanted to learn about her history and culture.

This research explores the relationship between multiculturalism, diversity, and altruistic behaviors. The researchers hypothesized that individuals with more accepting attitudes toward multiculturalismwould be more comfortable with diversity and manifest more altruistic behavior compared to those with less acceptingattitudes toward multiculturalism. In addition, the researchers also hypothesized that individuals primed with multicultural images would be more likely to be comfortable with diversity and showmore altruistic behavior than those primed with American images. Multiple 2x2 ANOVA tests were utilized to study the effects ofmulticultural attitudes and cultural priming on comfort with diversity and altruistic behavior. No significant main effect of the priming strategies was found; however, attitudes toward multiculturalismdid have a significant effect on all three of the dependent variables, such that participants that scored high on multicultural acceptance were more accepting of diversity and more likely todonate both time and money to a person in need.

The purpose of this study is to compare the efficacy of two learning methods: the traditional slideshow method of disseminating information (control group) versus the usage of guided digitalsimulations (experimental group). Two hypotheses are proposed: interactivity hypothesis and distraction hypothesis. The distraction hypothesis predicts that the control group will learn better whilethe interactivity hypothesis predicts that the experimental group will learn better. The results showed no significant difference between the groups on transfer-scores, and the control group rated the learning activity as more enjoyable and easier than did theexperimental group. The results partially support the distraction hypothesis.

The purpose of this study is to gauge the effects of perceived general stress levels and acute stress on working-memory-basedcognitive performance. Cortisol is the long-term stress hormone of the body, and is vital to enacting a quick and efficient stress response. However, when chronically present at higher-than-normal levels as often can be the case with long-term perceived stress cortisol has been known to negatively affect many bodily systems, including reproductive, immune, and cognitive function. Our study seeks to explore the effect that higherthan-average perceived general stress levels have on female students’ performance on two cognitive tasks: a math exam with gradually increasing difficulty, and a complicated traceable maze that participants must solve after being shown the answer key for a few seconds beforehand. This study will utilize a basic health questionnaire, a general stressquestionnaire, a mental math exam that gradually increases in difficulty and has a time limit (thus creating increased stress with urgency to complete), and a traceable maze test that is intended to test working memory. This study has far-reaching implications in understanding the relationship between ambient stress, general stress and cognitive performance, and could pave the way for improvements in mental health resources, accessibility to these mental health resources in higher education, and women’s health in general.

The purpose of “White by Association: The Mixed Marriage Policy of Japanese American Internees” is to describe in detail theMixed Marriage Policy, implemented during World War II regarding the incarceration of Japanese Americans, and the reasonsfor its implementation. This policy allowed for specific multiracial Japanese Americans and those involved in mixed marriages withWhite males to exit the camps and return home to the West Coast if they could prove their lifestyles to be culturally Caucasian. This paper argues that the Mixed Marriage Policy was created in order to prevent White males from challenging the constitutionality of the Japanese American incarceration.