During the summer months, you can expect to find a young person atop a lifeguard stand or behind an ice cream counter, but at the Family Resiliency Center (FRC), summer means hosting high school and undergraduate students who want to explore the research process.
Across June, July and August, three students honed their research skills at FRC as they developed assessments for an ongoing project implementing a mindful movement program for preschoolers.
Sophia Deltas, a junior at the University Laboratory High School, and Lai Wei, a senior at Mahomet-Seymour High School, watched video recordings of preschool classrooms as the mindful movement program was being implemented, while Jasmine Alfred, a junior psychology major at the University of Illinois, cataloged behaviors exhibited in behavioral task footage before and after programming. In each case, the students worked with a team of FRC mentors—Rachel Jackson-Gordon, Dana Eldreth, Yuliana Soto, Hong Li and Jacinda Dariotis—to craft rubrics that give further nuance to the behavioral data.
Deltas and Wei poured over classroom data to include a new scale—attentiveness—that supplements the dataset’s existing measures of engagement with and disruptiveness during program implementation. Adopting this third measure will help account for those students who are neither actively engaged nor blatantly disruptive—that is, students who are visibly paying attention and interested without participating through movement.
Alfred examined videos of children performing tasks that assessed their cognitive control and impulsiveness. Alfred made a rubric for a delayed gratification task, in which children had to wait without touching or peeking at a prize. Alfred’s rubric cataloged how the children behaved while waiting and what strategies they used to regulate their emotions.
The following Q&A is excerpted from a roundtable conversation with the students in the middle of their summer stint at FRC.
What are some of your reflections on the research process, and what place, if any, does research have in your future goals?
Lai Wei: I had never done research before, so everything was really new to me. I first thought that research is someone asking a question and then gathering data to come up with an expected result. But now it seems different to me. I learned that researchers don’t know what will be the outcome of the questions they ask.
Jasmine Alfred: I have always been interested in research, and I have taken classes at Illinois where we performed research. But, for me, those never felt fully…concrete. I would look something up and write an analysis of it, but I was not actually seeing an experiment, watching the different behaviors, and then seeing whether the intervention worked. This summer research experience has changed what I want to do professionally. I still want to be a doctor, but now including research in that plan feels more tenable. I feel like I can do both medicine and research.
Sophia Deltas: I used to think that research dealt with cause and effect and that it tested questions that were smaller: you have a question, then you answer it. So when I arrived here, I asked, “What’s your question?” and the response was, “Well, we have like six.” So I asked, “You’re going to write six different papers?” and they said, “Yeah—or more. On just this one study.” That’s when I realized, if I go into public health, I won’t just be asking one question at a time. You can do a lot with one study. It seems efficient, and I like that.
Is there any aspect of the research that has surprised you?
JA: I will say seeing the differences in the children. Even though I was not there in the assessment room, I can see the effectiveness [of the mindful movement program] just by watching the videos as an observer. And now that we are actually pulling together a rubric and putting together numbers, those numbers seem to match my experience of watching the assessments. I was surprised that I could actually see something in the children’s behavior that was reinforced by the data.
LW: I would say something similar. At first, Jacinda sent us an article about the program that mentioned a one-to-two percent change [between pre- and post-program implementation]. I was worried that this scale would be biased and depend on teachers’ individual perceptions of the classroom. But I was surprised: I could see how the program helped some children be more focused and involved with the teacher.
SD: Something that surprised me was how much effort is really put into every single step of the process. I thought it would be more subjective scoring a child—that you could just watch and say, “OK, you're engaged, you're attentive, you're not disruptive.” And that the subjective score would be pretty intuitive—like you could just look at someone and predict how they would perform on the different assessments, like the gift delay task. But then when we actually started coding the data, we had to be very intentional about our definitions for engagement, disruptiveness and attentiveness. And then it’s the computer that does the analysis of clustering profiles for different responses to the program. It is much more controlled than I expected.
JA: Going off that, I would add knowing what is most important and what to take note of. We came up with a lot of definitions. For example, one of our definitions is whether the child looks at the gift bag. At first, I would have thought that this action isn’t a big deal, but in fact, looking at the bag can mean different things. It could just be the child distracting himself. The same is true of standing up and moving about the room—that can actually be a good activity because it shows that the child might be using mindful movement techniques to help regulate their emotions. The smallest details can have a large impact in terms of helping us find what is important and what actions we do not want to consider.
Has engaging in research changed you in any way? What will you take away from your summer here performing research?
SD: I was in one of these studies when I was a kid. I remember that they placed a cookie in front of me and said I could either eat it now or wait and receive two cookies. Yeah…I failed that. [laughs] But now looking back I can see a lot more significance. I used to think, “Man, I have bad impulse control,” but now I understand how impulse control is a part of emotional regulation and emotional regulation is tied to outcomes in middle school and high school and even later on professionally. There is so much literature showing that behavior when you are a small child can predict a lot, and Jacinda was telling me that emotional regulation is like one of the things that is very predictive. So now I’m thinking, “You know, I should probably fix this…” [laughs]
LW: Your question was how the research process changed me, I would honestly say that the people I worked with really changed me. For example, Sophia. She will be…she is really hard working, and she focuses a lot on details. I can learn so much from her.
JA: Yeah, I have learned a lot this summer, and having so much hands-on guidance has been very helpful. I would also say: something I realized this summer is just how smart children are. Even as small as they are, there is so much going on inside a child’s head. To watch them try to avoid touching the bag, or to reach out and touch it, and to know what they should and should not be doing… It was fascinating and often very funny to see. And across the other assessment tasks, too, it struck me just how children are very, very smart.
SD: Can I add one more thing? Everyone I got to work with has been genuinely invested in teaching me, and I am very grateful for that. I have been invested in academics my whole life, and I worked hard to be accepted into this program, but there are other kids out there who might not know how cool programs like this are. I think if they knew opportunities like this existed that could make a big difference in helping them reach their potential. It could make a difference in their education, just to know that they can have a goal, have fun with research, and explore questions. Even when they are young, that ambition is good. Research is not super out of reach.