Several factors influence students’ ability to access the disability accommodations necessary to complete coursework; one of the main factors, however, is the degree to which instructors are willing or able to accommodate their students’ needs. Crucially, students often need to discern if instructors will accommodate their needs before they can register for class. Students must navigate differences in communication styles and perspectives on what constitutes reasonable accommodation. Further, instructors’ knowledge of their own responsibilities, rights, and the process by which accommodations are accessed, is limited. Instructors are not made aware of their role in providing accommodations or the timeline for their involvement. They are often reluctant to provide assistance for fear of overstepping boundaries set by their institutions. The ambiguity of the instructor’s role in accessibility is actively causing harm. Multiply-marginalized students face a number of additional barriers: students who have less wealth have impaired access to healthcare, and are more likely to face poor healthcare outcomes. Further, the effects of marginalization ensure that students with intersectional identities are less likely to be wealthy. While these facts are rarely officially disputed, it is often difficult to determine what supports are missing, why they are missing, and how support can be provided to the benefit of all stakeholders. In order to establish how students and instructor perceptions differ from each other and from the recommended process, more data is sorely needed; this study utilized a basic survey to identify the areas in which instructors and students need further support. Most queries were designed to have quantifiable responses; freeform responses were evaluated to identify the most common topics and positionality respondents presented. Responses which directly oposed the most common positionalities were then quantified. Expected results largely aligned with known areas of need, specifically the need for more transparency and training surrounding accessibility. 

Within the United States, anxiety disorders are the most prevalent mental disorders in adults (Stein et al., 2017), and the use of online platforms to receive support for the disorders has significantly increased (Pendse et al., 2019). Current research has illustrated the promise of online communities in meeting support needs. To build on these findings, I will examine how users elicit support, and whether certain elicitation strategies receive greater engagement from other community members. Thus, using content analysis, this study compares the strategies posters employ to request social support, the types of support (i.e., informational, emotional, esteem, social presence) that creators request, and the frequency of responses that creators receive, by examining r/Anxiety posts with the most (n=100), and least (n=100), engagement. I am contributing to the interpersonal communication literature through my adaptation of support marshaling in an online context (Crowley et al., 2016), to answer: How do posters of the r/Anxiety subreddit elicit support? What type of support do posters request most often? How do posts with more replies differ from those with fewer responses? I anticipate emergent results will indicate that the creators utilizing multiple forms of support elicitation will have greater engagement from the r/Anxiety community. This work will start to fill the gap in knowledge of support marshaling strategies present within anxiety online forums while providing more knowledge about how posters can use the results to form engaging posts and recieve more support.

International students transition from a controlled environment in their home countries to an unfamiliar one with new culture in their host country. This highly complex change can bring about information seeking needs to navigate everyday life. As a result, international students may turn to their host university for answers and resources. This research study aims to examine the perceptions of undergraduate international students at the University of Washington (UW) with regard to the support they receive from their host university for their everyday life information seeking (ELIS) needs. The question guiding this study is: How do perceptions of support from the host university in everyday-life information seeking of 1st-year international students compare with those of 4th-year international students? Findings will be based on data from a survey of UW undergraduate international students about their perceptions of support from their host university. Results of this research study will contribute to the scholarship of Culture Learning Theory, which concerns the challenges experienced by sojourners in navigating through a new culture. Moreover, the findings have scope to support host universities as well as organizations within the host university that serve international students. I plan to disseminate a findings report to UW institutions such as International Student Services (ISS), Foundation for International Understanding Through Students (FIUTS), Center for International Relations and Cultural Leadership Exchange (CIRLCLE), etc. The report will contain a robust data analysis of the satisfaction of international students at UW, and will detail future recommendations from the participants about what will improve their experience abroad. By conducting research on the perceptions of international students pertaining to the support they receive from the host university for their ELIS needs, both scholars and university staff will gain perspective on how international students experience information-seeking aspects of culture learning.

Simulation-based education (SBE) has become a necessity in a post-COVID world. Simulations used in education are interactive events in which students practice activities in a simulated environment. Previous studies show improved real-life performance through procedural learning for healthcare students, military personnel, and children. In this study, undergraduate biology students played a urinalysis lab simulator video game for the purpose of evaluating the technology as a potential pedagogical tool in a lower-division physiology course. The subject of the video game was chosen because students voiced trepidation regarding the use of urine samples in the BIOL119 laboratory environment, and made mistakes in lab procedures. I designed a simulator video game and I intentionally designed the player character with a feminine locomotion system for the purpose of countering gender stereotype threats in a laboratory setting. Stereotype threats are defined as “being at risk of confirming, as self-characteristic, a negative stereotype about one's group”. Laboratory tasks were separated into video game ‘quests' which earned the player virtual experience points (XP) gameplay data were measured and collected using a MySQL database. I developed a post-game survey to collect and analyze data on the general emotional state in regard to the lab, the game, as well as gender identity in the context of participating in a STEM laboratory. An instructor survey was also conducted to evaluate the game as a potential pedagogical tool. It is expected that students will report feeling more confident about lab procedures and handling urine samples, and that the student players are less affected by stereotype threat. The impact of this study could lead to greater adoption of SBE, reduce laboratory resource costs, and provide flexibility in lab delivery. It could also lead to more effective, scientifically rigorous simulations and provide a framework for more complex simulations in future development.

Photovoice is a research methodology that uses photography as a tool for participants to express their thoughts on a topic of interest. Our project is specified towards marginalized communities and to give them a voice regarding issues each group faces. The main purpose of photovoice is to create change in our community by analyzing photographs provided by the participants.

Recent publications of photovoice projects at universities have yet to focus on a number of groups and their experiences on campus. We have decided to create a photovoice project specifically tailored to this area of interest.

This project focuses on four groups in the University of Washington Bothell campus: Students of Color, Muslim students, LGBTQ students, and first-generation students. 15 students participated in this study, with around 2 to 4 participants in each group. Our goal is to learn how these groups experience college/university differently compared to students outside of these groups. We asked participants to answer prompts that discuss how they experienced college academically, socially, and emotionally. Thus, we analyzed their experiences and formatted them into differing “codes” and “themes”.

Most themes in the project overlapped between the groups. The three notable themes were (1) The disconnect between faculty and students, (2) Expectations of what students should have and have access to, and (3) Struggling in finding ways to express oneself. Two more themes are to be created from the data we collected.

The project is still under development, and we are expecting to analyze these themes more in-depth. The goal of this project is to highlight disparities in the universities’ process of matriculation. Moreover, we hope to use this research to revise the assumptions and rules regarding resources and general student welfare to create more accessible resources and a streamlined transition from primary to secondary education.

This study examines how undergraduate students majoring in humanities and social sciences navigate the institutional culture of higher education (HE) through a case study at the University of Washington. I identify two different logics within HE that contribute to its institutional culture — the industry logic and the social institution logic. The industry logic refers to the growing trend of business and industry orientations in HE — especially since the emergence of neoliberalism in the 1970s. The social institution logic is the more traditional ideal of HE that aims to cultivate values of citizenship and morals. The goal of this study is to examine how undergraduate students understand and respond to changes in institutional culture. While the commodification of HE is well studied, scholarly attention neglects its evolution and fails to articulate students’ response to this shift. This study is inductive and qualitative — focusing on undergraduate experiences and how students give cultural meaning to their experiences under varying institutional culture. I will conduct 12 semi-structured interviews with undergraduate students majoring in humanities or social sciences to understand their college experiences. Though the anticipated results of the study have yet to be determined due to the inductive nature, I hope to examine how students reconcile their passions and actual experiences under institutional culture of HE. Any disparities observed between universities as institutions and students as agentic individuals might reveal the neglected demands within society. This research will provide insights to which kind of education system our society needs today, which will lead to better policies about the future development of HE.