Interdisciplinary – Page 21 – UROP Spring Symposium 2021

Interdisciplinary

The Resilience Project: Earthquake threats to Mid-west and Northeastern regions of U.S.

Whereas the number of earthquakes per year remain steady, modern society faces increasing threats to life, infrastructure and economic activity. In order for communities to improve their resilience against inevitable earthquakes, information is needed on how they will affect their regions and how they can build resilience against a largely unstoppable natural disaster. Using public data, this undergraduate research study investigates the earthquake patterns and threats to both Midwest and the broader northeastern regions of the U.S, with a focus on the societal impacts of earthquakes in these regions. Earthquake data over a 45 year period establish that the number as well as magnitude of earthquakes in this region is quite small, compared to regions of the western US. The data reveals that the average annual injury and the earthquake damage costs for this region are relatively low. It is expected that, with this information, people can reliably predict earth occurrences and decide whether their regions need to build a costly earthquake resilient infrastructure, which may exceed the regional damage of natural events.

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Architecture of Dwelling: Considering Design, Social Relations, and Policy in Single and Multi-Family Housing

Supportive housing is a cost-effective combination of affordable housing with services that helps people live more stable, productive lives. Having such housing options are vital especially in cities undergoing rapid re-development because rising property values displace low-income households from their homes and sources of income. New Hope Housing is a non-profit organization that aims to provide such housing to individuals and families. A case study by the Urban Land Institute offers a comprehensive analysis on one of New Hope Housing’s apartments, highlighting the unique structure of their development model and operating timeline. Building on an integrated approach between a debt-free development model and single room occupancy (SRO) design, this research project looks for solutions to how SROs can re-define housing and positively impact the neighborhoods surrounding low-income housing.

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To Make the Slave Anew

To Make the Slave Anew: Art, History, and the Politics of Authenticity is a book that aims to discern how our modern understanding of slavery and the life of the slave came to be. It explores the memory of slavery and racism in the United States through the lens of music, visual studies, literature, ethnography and folklore. Each chapter achieves this by studying various figures, events, and pieces of work that impacted the cultural conception of slavery by including pictures of art and excerpts from literature, scholarly work, journals, etc. Through the exploration of various methods of cultural memory, To Make the Slave Anew argues that our contemporary perceptions of slavery are based on more recent””largely late nineteenth and early twentieth century””myths regarding the life of the slave and slavery in the South. With recent questions on the memory and relics of racism and slavery in the United States gaining more attention, To Make the Slave Anew offers a way of understanding how society comes to remember such concepts, and how those memories can shift with time.

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Archaeology of Jebel Barkal Website Creation

Jebel Barkal is a UNESCO World Heritage site in northern Sudan. The Jebel Barkal Archaeological Project at the University of Michigan was looking for an effective way to share its archaeological findings with a range of audiences and found that creating a website would meet these needs. We surveyed different archaeological project websites to determine which features would work well for the project’s needs. This also helped us to determine what website builder would be utilized, as they all have different offerings for features you can include. In addition, we looked into how the websites looked aesthetically to figure out what would appeal most to different audiences, the general public, teachers, students, scholars, and eventually people in Sudan (in an Arabic version). From our previous research we found that the features most important to us were a research portal, one section with older research from the previous director, Tim Kendall, one from the current director, Geoff Emberling, and a news feed/blog to keep visitors up to date with the findings at the site and intrigue possible sponsors to want to donate. We also found that for aesthetic purposes, making sure text passages are not too long and that there are images included helps to keep the user connected to the topic but not overwhelmed. Lastly, formatting of the website was discussed frequently as some audiences have different access to computers and phones; we found that websites generally need a universal format that will look good no matter what device they are displayed on. In conclusion, it will be possible to create an engaging website for this project that will have research available for professionals and researchers to use, but also be useful to the general public with shorter summaries of the research.

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Archaeology of Jebel Barkal (ancient Nubia)

Gebel Barkal is an archaeological site in Northern Sudan along the Nile River that was a capital city and temple center of ancient Kush (Nubia). The site was first excavated in 1916-20 under the direction of George Reisner, an archaeologist based at Harvard and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. A University of Michigan project is beginning to work at the site with both excavation and conservation, working with the local community to create lasting connections surrounding this site. I have been working to to transcribe George Reisner’s field diaries from 1918 to 1920. By using older information of past seasons (or excavations), my mentor and his colleagues can inform their excavation and gain insight on the best ways to excavate and, in turn, preserve the site.

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The Police Killings and Protest Dataset

Police killings have been a prominent issue in the United States and seemingly has been increasing over the past 6 years. Some of these killings, such as Michael Brown and Georgy Floyd have sparked nationwide protests that have drawn crowds of 10,000 people. While some of these police killings have gained widespread attention, there are hundreds that have gone unnoticed. This raises the question of why certain police killings spark protests and others don’t. In order to facilitate this research, all police killings from 2015 and 2016 will be coded. Through extensive online searches and the use of various social media platforms protests for each killing is recorded. The location of the protest, the number of participants, who organized the protests, and the race of the protesters are all recorded and are input into an survey system that organizes the information. Based on the current information collected, it appears that race is one of the most important components. African Americans that were killed by police on average have more protests surrounding their death. This is likely tied to the underlying racist sentiments held by many police departments. Second to race, age was an important component. For non-Black victims, those who were 18 years of age or younger had more protests surrounding their death and for Black victims under 18 there were also more protests in comparison to those that were older. With the information collected, it can be concluded that while all police killings don’t lead to protests, race and age are big determining factors for if there are.

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The effect of a decedent’s mental health status on protests following police killings

In 2015, 1,146 Americans were killed by the police, and some of these killings were followed by protests. It is important to investigate why some killings led to protests while others did not. The existence of a protest could be due to numerous factors, such as location, the age of the decedent, the existence of cell phone footage, etc. Specifically, this research investigates whether people are more likely to protest a police killing if the decedent had mental health issues. In order to answer this question, we gather data on each police killing in 2015 using Google search, local newspapers, and social media. This data included whether the decedent had a history of mental health disorders, whether they were behaving erratically at the time of their death, and whether there were any protests following their death. Then, a random sample of 701 of the deaths was taken to investigate whether the decedent’s mental health affected the existence of a protest. We will use the R statistical software and t-tests to determine whether a decedent’s mental health status affects the existence of protests. We expect that there will be more protests if a decedent has mental health issues. These results will reveal more information about protests following police killings in the United States, an important topic because protests have the potential to alter the aftermath of a killing and lead to a heightened awareness of social issues.

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The Effect of a Decedent’s Mental Health on Protests Following Police Killings

n 2015, 1,146 Americans were killed by the police, and some of these killings were followed by protests. It is important to investigate why some killings led to protests while others did not. The existence of a protest could be due to numerous factors, such as location, the age of the decedent, the existence of cell phone footage, etc. Specifically, this research investigates whether people are more likely to protest a police killing if the decedent had mental health issues. In order to answer this question, we gather data on each police killing in 2015 using Google search, local newspapers, and social media. This data included whether the decedent had a history of mental health disorders, whether they were behaving erratically at the time of their death, and whether there were any protests following their death. Then, a random sample of 701 of the deaths was taken to investigate whether the decedent’s mental health affected the existence of a protest. We will use the R statistical software and t-tests to determine whether a decedent’s mental health status affects the existence of protests. We expect that there will be more protests if a decedent has mental health issues. These results will reveal more information about protests following police killings in the United States, an important topic because protests have the potential to alter the aftermath of a killing and lead to a heightened awareness of social issues.

The Effect of a Decedent’s Mental Health on Protests Following Police Killings Read More »

Studying the Role of Feedback and Assessment in Teacher Preparation

Educator preparation programs train aspiring primary and secondary school teachers by pairing them with advising instructors to receive mentorship through observation, co-teaching, and independent student instruction. Until recently, little attention was given to the impact of effective mentorship from advising instructors. This study examines the impact of instructionally effective mentorship on aspiring teachers by categorizing over 4000 entries of written feedback, provided by the Tennessee Department of Education, that mentor teachers have given to training teachers. These feedback entries are coded into any applicable number of the 16 different categories of instructional improvement, including areas of both instructional content and quality of instruction. The area of study specific to the UROP project focuses on the role of feedback in student assessment. Results are expected to demonstrate that student teachers receiving feedback about their skills in student assessment feel more confident in assessing student learning following their completion of the educator preparation program. This study is part of a growing body of research on student teacher preparation reform. By determining specific areas of instructional feedback to be effective or ineffective, this research will contribute potential policy changes in educator preparation programs.

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Studying the Impact of Mentor Feedback on Preservice Teacher Satisfaction

Feedback has been pointed out as a prerequisite for professional growth for experts and novices alike. In the education field, researchers have argued that preservice teachers, or student teachers, need high quality feedback to become exemplary teachers for their future students. One of the goals of the Mentors Matter initiative was to study what constitutes quality feedback during clinical placements from mentor teachers and university supervisors. In our project, we coded 4,010 comments to 394 student teachers for the content and quality that student teachers received as part of their clinical assessments. In our presentation, we will discuss how comments on Teacher Attributes (TA), Connections across Observations (CaO), Data Driven Feedback (DDF), and Actionable Recommendation (AR) relate to student teachers’ satisfaction with their clinical placements. Our results can help establish a guideline for having mentor teachers and university supervisors to provide high quality feedback to student teachers to train and prepare stronger teachers.

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