Research that a Beacon College student and a recent graduate presented this spring at a prestigious psychological conference will be collected in the organization’s edited electronic book, the group recently announced.
The distinction goes to Matt Czachur, a senior, and Venus Beulah, a spring 2017 graduate, said Dr. A.J. Marsden, assistant professor of human services and psychology at Beacon, who mentored the pair.
They are the only (then) undergraduates whose conference research summaries work will be bound in the Rocky Mountain Psychological Association Conference second annual edited e-book. It collects conference presentations from many regional and national psychology conventions and is published by the Society for the Teaching of Psychology, Marsden said.
In April, Czachur and Beulah shared research they conducted in Marsden’s “Research Design” course. Judges selected their work for presentation at the annual conference in Salt Lake City, UT from almost 500 research submissions that included professionals as well as undergraduate and graduate students. Their research was showcased during opening ceremonies.
Beulah’s research focused on identifying the age at which students with learning disabilities grasp the societal stigma associated with learning disabilities by observing local Montessori students.
She found that most students she studied realized — and became self-conscious — that they had a learning disability when they were 10 years old.
Similarly, college students with LDs, she found, felt significantly “different” from their peers, which contributed to drastically less acceptance among their peers.
Tackling a racier subject, Czachur, explored the tension between sexuality and grade point average. He conjectured that sexually active students enjoy higher GPAs than do their celibate or less promiscuous counterparts — and that the number of sexual partners a student boasts may influence GPA.
His research turned up no meaningful difference in GPAs between sexually active students and those who were not. However, he discovered a significant inconsistency between the number of sexual partners and GPA: Students with up to three sexual partners enjoyed the highest grade point averages.