Undergraduate Research and Creative Activities Journal

In the last thirty years, mathematics standards have undergone frequent changes due to two conflicting perspectives: reformists and traditionalists. The purpose of this study is to assess any lasting impacts of the 1997 California Math Standards. I interviewed three faculty in three categories about diversity, curriculum, and stakeholder perspective. Presented here are findings and common themes that emerged from the analysis of interviews. Results showed that a lasting impact of the Math Wars was the 2010 Common Core Standards, written in a way to favor the reform movement of the 1990s. A professional development perspective as an approach is utilized.

The objective of this study is to explore the relationship between implicit gender bias in medical professionals and misdiagnosis in young female-identified patients. The study examines the ways in which the age and gender of the patient can impact the accuracy and timeliness of the diagnoses young women receive. Furthermore, it analyzes how experiences with misdiagnosis alter patients’ perceptions of doctors. The findings of this study are based upon the survey responses of 21 young women, ages 19-25 years old.

Honduras has endured a long history of environmental problems that are fueled by pressure from international bodies to increase economically-fueled activities that result in extreme land degradation. Logging, dam building, mining, and deforestation operations have all been met with extensive protests by indigenous groups, coalitions and movements. In response, interests supporting the continued exploitation of resources have subjected these groups to extreme and systematic violence in the hopes of silencing them. How successful is this use of terror to coerce violence? This paper reviews two case studies of violence in Honduras: the murder of internationally-recognized activist Berta Cáceres, and the violence perpetrated against the Tolupan people.

In the seventeenth century, Massachusetts Bay Colony leaders often meted out bodily punishments with the intention of shaming offenders. Both the type of crime presented and the bodily punishments given reflected a deliberate strategy on the part of Puritan leaders. By examining the Colony’s court records between 1630–1675, this paper explores what a Puritan legal system looked like with respect to early bodily chastisements. Almost all the crimes that were punished through physical correction also had some sort of bodily violation. No matter how gruesome, the punishments represented the community’s efforts to return the offender to the body politic.

Dreams are the subjective experiences that occur during sleep, and their subject matter differs as a function of sleep stage or time of night. Dream content is reflective of the activity of brain structures concerned with information processing and memory consolidation [1]. Sigmund Freud, the founder of the psychoanalytic approach and author of The Interpretation of Dreams, described dreams as the “royal road to the unconscious.” He believed that the dreaming and the waking mind were continuous and that dreams were reflections of conflicts between unconscious desires and the conscious mind [2]. Freud proposed that the symbolic language of reported, or manifest dreams could be decoded to reveal the hidden latent dream—the result of a forbidden wish. His work inspired further research on the meaning and imagery contained within dreams that corroborated some of his views but not others, so that we now believe that dreams are the product of more than just unconscious desires [3]. This project seeks to comprehend the local understandings of dreams and their meanings— implicit and explicit— among young people in the United States today.

Humans search for specific targets in complex scenes to navigate the world. This ability to search is integral to survival in many ways, from its most basic role in hunting and gathering to its more advanced application to the detection of medical conditions in the field of radiology. According to previous research, the ability to search efficiently in a visual task can be learned over time. Despite sufficient evidence, in this paper, we recognize numerous findings that support the presence of greater learning and confidence curves in 3D versus 2D image search. The study of such learning patterns is important to the field of medicine as we hope to train radiologists to be as efficient, accurate, and confident as possible.

The topic of religious tolerance is one that spans the scope of human history. In the following essay, this subject will be examined within the context of the late Roman Empire (180-395 CE.). This ancient period represents a chapter of Roman history almost exclusively recounted by ancient Christian historians, the result of which has led to the establishment of the famous narrative depicting late Romans as severely intolerant of non-Roman religions– most notably, Christianity. Through the analysis of extensive documentation, leading to the uncovering of inherent Christian bias, this established history will be challenged in an effort to present a narrative which characterizes the Roman society as exhibiting substantially more religious tolerance than previously believed.

Longevity analysis provides valuable public health facts that can influence public policy, business decision-making, or new academic research directions. We must explore and interpret mortality data to gain these insights. This paper introduces a Longevity Forecasting Tool that we created with Shiny, an R package that facilitates interactive dashboard development. This tool showcases the use of Gaussian process regression for modeling mortality data. We use publicly available detailed mortality data from the Centers for Disease Control Wide-ranging Online Data for Epidemiologic Research (CDC WONDER). This tool uses interactive data visualizations to engage users to better understand the mortality experiences across several U.S. groups.

The purpose of this study is to analyze the effectiveness of the global Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) in tackling educational inequity, with an emphasis on the academic experiences of UCSB students. This research was done amidst the various controversies among local academic institutions, which included the 2019 California college admissions scandals and 2020 cost of living adjustment (COLA) protests. PISA is primarily a topdown initiative as it mainly champions educational equity through collaborations with government officials. This neglects the key role of community actors, such as governors and principals, and does not account for localized complexities, such as federalism in the United States. To identify bottom-up approaches that would complement PISA, a pilot study on the academic experiences of UCSB students was done. Key findings included 88% of the respondents coming from counties with higher standards of living, and only 3% having considered an overseas university education. The paper thus suggests that the global PISA initiative is inadequate in resolving localized educational inequities and raises two bottom-up programs – college open-day sessions in disadvantaged counties and local forums on state education policies – to improve socio-spatial disparities in educational equity.

This paper focuses on the lives of two of the most well-known female pirates, Anne Bonny and Mary Read. Within this paper I analyze different documents that relate plausible histories of these two women’s’ lives and differentiate between the accuracy of sources. I question modes of discussing these women and utilize a variety of secondary sources to examine primary sources and their impacts. This paper critiques standard discussions and histories of these two women, instead offering a more humanizing and historically accurate way of seeing them that exists outside of popular culture’s romanticism and mythologization of them.