When human development and family studies senior Mercedes Anderson watched “Miss Representation” – a 2011 documentary by Jennifer Siebel Newsom that investigates how women have been represented in mass media and what stereotypes that places on female identity – she wanted to learn more about the limitations placed on girls in the professional world.
“In the documentary, they talked about girls having dreams to be president, but, by the time they were older, they no longer felt that they had the abilities to achieve these goals,” Anderson said. “It made me curious to understand why girls lacked the confidence to reach for positions of power.”
Anderson utilized funding from the Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship, or SURF, to study self-efficacy in middle-school children.
“Women are kind of an under-represented community in the STEM field,” Anderson said. “My overall goal was to look at how to increase persistence for female students that are interested in STEM.”
The SURF program provides students the opportunity to research a chosen topic for 10 weeks with a $3,500 stipend from the University. The program aims to enable students to have a substantive research experience, according to Karen Weber, the director of the Office of Undergraduate Research.
Through the program, students like Anderson consulted with a faculty mentor and attended weekly luncheons, where lecturers spoke on anything from research ethics to applying to graduate school.
Because class was out and she chose to study middle school students, Anderson spent the summer analyzing literature with her mentor on scale development and qualitative measures. She also spent a portion of her time submitting documents to the Institutional Review Board, which maintains that human subjects are treated fairly and safely in any research experiment.
“SURF was kind of my foot in the door,” Anderson said.
For Anderson, the study is not over. Later this month, she will attend middle schools in the Houston area to collect data, attempting to determine how confident students are in their abilities to complete tasks or achieve goals. After compiling the findings, she hopes to publish her conclusions in an academic journal. Anderson credited SURF for her ability to accomplish this.
Students interested in the SURF program can contact Weber at [email protected]. Applications are due Friday, March 27.
