Recent Theses and Project Topics (Non-IDS Majors)

Avalyn Dixon-Gardner (2024)
Mass media influences our expectations of others, establishing guidelines for conducting ourselves, and leading our lives. Media has the power to spread awareness of mental health issues, and simultaneously misinform, normalize, and glamorize them. My study assessed how college students’ knowledge of mental health issues is influenced by their media consumption. Surveys with college students were used to understand students’ media use, where they gained mental-health-related information, and how mental health issues were depicted in media. Since the voices of mental health professionals have been lacking from these media-related conversations in scholarly work, I interviewed several professionals to gauge their attitudes and beliefs on the intersecting field between media and mental health. This exploratory study combined theories and studies utilized in the fields of Psychology, Child Study and Human Development, and Media Communication with the hopes that this study will assist with promoting the best practices to support students using media to learn about mental health issues.

Kataleeya Powers (2024)
Learning assistants (LAs) are undergraduate students whose main role is to facilitate discussion amongst small groups of students during lecture time in active learning classes. The implementation of LAs has been specifically beneficial for marginalized students’ conceptual learning outcomes and influences socioemotional aspects of students’ learning, i.e., LAs have been shown to increase student engagement and positive attitudes towards learning. While it is known that LAs influence socioemotional aspects of students’ learning over the course of a semester, less is known about how these socioemotional aspects of learning happen in the moment of interaction between LAs and small groups of students. Thus, in this study, I investigated how LAs’ actions impact student’s socioemotional components of learning. This study was informed by sociocultural theory, which views learning and knowledge development as occurring via interactions with mediating artifacts, such as discourse, and specifically by two sociocultural frameworks—the formative assessment enactment model (FAEM) and practical epistemology analysis (PEA)—used to characterize LA actions and student in-the-moment learning, respectively. Separately, these frameworks revealed information about the types of actions LAs take and how in-the-moment learning progresses. Combining these two frameworks with specific attention to group dynamics allows for more insight on how learning assistants impact student-group socioemotional aspects of learning. Previously collected data on LA-student interactions from 12 different Chemistry and Physics courses at two university institutions were utilized for this study. My work focused on 37 different LAs for at least two interactions each. The findings of this study provide a better understanding of the impact that LA actions have on student-group socioemotional aspects of learning.

Alienor Rice (2024)
Written and defended entirely in Spanish, my thesis identified and analyzed attitudes towards gender-inclusive language (GIL) in Buenos Aires, Argentina. In the past decade, the use of GIL—language that does not discriminate against any sex, gender, or gender identity—has risen in the Spanish-speaking world, including in Argentina. The Ministry of Education of Buenos Aires’ ban on the use of GIL in schools in 2022, however, revived a heated controversy among politicians and the general public alike, regarding whether the language variant has its place in the Spanish language or whether it is alien and harmful. The following questions arise: What type of responses did the ban on GIL elicit in the public eye, and what do they reveal about people’s attitudes towards GIL? How might the ban on GIL and the resulting public response harm the identity development of trans and nonbinary adolescents? In order to gauge the public’s attitudes towards GIL, I argued that in addition to the ban itself, this overwhelming rejection of GIL by Twitter users—representative, to a certain extent, of the general public—could harm trans and nonbinary adolescents’ development by hindering their ability to explore, achieve, and express their identity. My thesis combined the fields of Linguistics, Spanish, and Child Study and Human Development.

Paolo Padova (2023)
This senior thesis sought to analyze the environmental sabotage of a radical environmental group from the 1980s, Earth First! as a form of technology. The main sabotage technique studied was called "tree spiking" which entailed driving a spike into a tree to break any chainsaw that might try to fell the tree. The purpose of analyzing these tools and techniques of sabotage was to challenge assumptions about technology, radical direct-action activism, and environmentalism. In studying Earth First! sabotage as technology I used theories and tools that draw primarily on Science, Technology, and Society (STS) and Anthropology. A critical assumption at the core of the thesis, and STS more broadly, is that technoscience is developed through social processes and is co-constructed with, and in relation to, ideas of gender, race, class, etc. In the thesis I showed that Earth First!'s ideas about gender were reflected in their sabotage technologies and that sabotage technologies could change Earth First!'s politics. I concluded the thesis by suggesting that for environmentalists today to understand how technology interacts with the environment they must understand technology as something that internalizes the relations of those who use it and can change those relationships.

Lily McIntyre (2022)
TikTok, a social media network focused on sharing bite-sized videos, has gained extreme popularity in the past few years, notably during the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. Despite the high levels of app usage and unregulated user-generated content, there is a large research gap in terms of the possible impact of TikTok on users’ self-esteem perceptions. Certain trends such as #WhatIEatInADay are irrevocably tied to conventional beauty and body standards and have gained traction and concern in the media. Other types of videos, such as footage of parties and lively social gatherings, also have potential impacts on users’ feelings but gain less media coverage. This thesis consisted of a mixed-method approach to assess some of TikTok’s possible effects on its users. First, a qualitative survey was administered via Qualtrics to 92 Tufts undergraduates that assessed user demographics, app behavior, and how those variables related to different facets of user self-esteem. Then, follow-up interviews were conducted via Zoom with 7 survey participants who indicated their willingness to participate. The results indicated that TikTok and self-esteem levels were significantly correlated among this sample. Body image was negatively associated with certain TikTok engagements. With regard to the perceived effects of TikTok use on respondents' social lives, results indicated that the ways in which the app was used for social purposes seemed to be more related to respondents' age than anything else, especially while factoring in the effects on social life from COVID-19. Moving forward, it is recommended that researchers study the effects of TikTok longitudinally to see if some of the preliminary findings reported in this thesis are sustained over time and among other samples. Further, researchers might focus on how TikTok use is related to issues of civic engagement.

Mengqi Wang (2022)
Teaching Time-lapse Photography in the Robotics STEAM Classroom
My senior thesis is on teaching time-lapse photography in the robotics STEAM* classroom, which touches upon photography, education, and robotics!

Throughout the year, I had the opportunity to iterate on the design of a light painting and robotics activity and brought it to a local middle school to examine student interests and learning. I’ve always known that I wanted to do something for children, and doing this interdisciplinary thesis allowed me to experience being a curriculum designer, a classroom instructor, and a researcher all at once. I was introduced to the field of educational research and seriously thought about appropriate content and difficulty levels as well as how to design and analyze a case study. Seeing students’ high involvement, growing self-image, and creativity also makes me have greater faith in project-based learning. Reflecting back, my thesis was a perfect way to combine my interest in Cognitive Science, Child Study, and Computer Science and I was glad to discover my passion for experience design and learned to better embrace uncertainties.

* STEAM stands for Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts, and Mathematics.