Autumn Christafore, Alyssa Schoonmaker, and Julia Hahn, three undergrad RAs working in Dr. Laura Morett's N.E.R.D. lab, presented a poster entitled "The Effects of Beat Gesture and Pitch Accenting on Discourse Comprehension and Memory" at the 2019 Undergraduate Research & Creativity Activity (URCA) Symposium. The presented poster can be found below. You can learn more about the Neuroscience of Education Research on Development (N.E.R.D.) and Dr. Morett's work here.
Celia Somers an RA in the ELDEN lab presented a poster at the 2019 Undergraduate Research & Creativity Activity (URCA) Symposium. In her poster titled "Let's Face it-N170 Rules: Temporal Processing of Facial Features in the Brain Using Event-Related Potential" (see below) Celia investigated the presence of an Event Related Potential (ERP) occurring in the brain when participants view human faces. Congrats to Celia! Mona Anchan represented the ELDEN lab at the 26th annual meeting of the Cognitive Neuroscience Society (CNS) in San Francisco, CA, March 23-26. Mona presented some of her recent work in a poster titled, "Does it Add Up? Comparing Arithmetic Processing in Bilinguals and Monolinguals" (see below). Mona is the first ELDEN student to attend the CNS meeting. You can learn more about Mona's research on bilingualism here.
First year doctoral students in the educational neuroscience concentration started a graduate student organization called AGSES. The purpose the Association of Graduate Students in Educational Studies (AGSES) is to represent the broad interests of doctoral students in the Department of Educational Studies. Dr. Firat Soylu will be the group's faculty advisor. You can learn more about AGSES here.
Dr. Firat Soylu received a University of Alabama Level 1 RGC grant, titled "Mathematical Processing Differences between Bilinguals and Monolinguals." Here is the abstract for his study:
With more than 25% of school students coming from immigrant households where the primary language spoken at home is not English, bilingual populations underperform in mathematics classrooms, where language of instruction in the classroom differs from their native language. In addition to sociocultural factors, this is partially due to bilinguals processing math knowledge differently compared to monolinguals. Differences between doing arithmetic in one’s native language and a second language have not been scrutinized extensively. To fill this gap, both behavioral and neural (Electroencephalography) measures will be used to examine how a group of adult bilinguals (Turkish/English) process simple and complex addition problems in their first (Turkish) and second (English) languages, and how arithmetic processing in bilinguals compare to English-speaking monolinguals. This study will be the first-step towards a research program that investigates bilingual math processing both in developmental and adult populations and will inform the needs of ESL (English as a Second Language) students in math classrooms. We are excited to announce that the University of Alabama College of Education will soon start offering a B.Sc. Major in Educational Neuroscience. The undergraduate program in educational neuroscience was approved by the Alabama Commission on Higher Education on September 15th and by The University of Alabama Board of Trustees on September 21st. The program will be the first of its kind in the world and will start enrolling students in the Fall 2020 semester.
The UA Educational Neuroscience Initiative is hiring two tenure-track faculty to start in Fall 2019. Please see https://facultyjobs.ua.edu/postings/43888 for the full description and application details.
Congrats to Brian Rivera, second year PhD student in the Ed Psych / Ed Neuro Concentration & the ELDEN Lab, for getting the 3rd place prize in the 2018 UA STEM Forward Conference! This is the third award Brian received in a month. See http://training.ua.edu/stem/stem-poster.php for details.
Congrats to Dr. Laura Morett for being awarded two research grants to support her research on gesture processing in the NERD Lab!
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