In the United States, education has historically been utilized as a vehicle of cultural assimilation. What that looks like, and its goals, has varied across time and region. Initially starting as the dominant white, anglo-saxon, protestant culture violently and brutally oppressing and subsuming the cultures of all others (including Black Americans, Indigenous peoples, and immigrants of a variety of backgrounds), and in current times moving towards a co-existence state in which multiculturalism and cultural pluralism is championed. It has yet to be determined as to whether the education system has caught up to societal shifts and what it means in terms of racially and culturally non-dominant student experiences. The primary question is how has assimilation-based educational practices impacted culturally non-dominant students in K-12 public schools? I conducted a qualitative synthesis across federated search databases evaluating common themes of resiliency and success, risk factors and failures, and avenues of potential change. I included qualitative peer-reviewed studies from the year 2000 or later, that focused on K-12 public schools in the United States, and that focused on culturally non-dominant students. Preliminary findings include language barriers being insufficiently addressed, culturally insensitive and irrelevant curriculum, lack of acknowledgement on the cultural perception of the value of education within teaching pedagogues, black/white racial paradigms of diversity and achievement gap, insufficient modeling of Americanness that reflects all students and an accurate history of the United States, and gaps with data aggregation and the resulting need for further research. Implications and future directions include key data disaggregation in research and school-based data collection, a reconsideration of what constitutes “standard” curriculum, and teacher education focused on humanistic and equitable principles.

Implicit bias, rooted in unconscious attitudes, fuels discrimination based on race, gender, or sexual orientation, disproportionately impacting marginalized groups. Despite the development of interventions addressing provider awareness of implicit bias, the advancement of clinical education through technology has been slow. In the UnBIASED research project, we investigated the usability of ConverSense, a personalized communication assessment tool to raise healthcare providers' awareness of bias in their communication with patients. This web-based tool measures social dimensions such as warmth, interactivity, engagement, and assertiveness from recorded patient-provider visits, and visualizes these patterns through graphs and embedded clips. In this study, we (PT, NE) examined whether ConverSense meets usability standards through heuristic evaluations conducted by design experts. Six healthcare technology experts participated in the evaluation of ConverSense using Nielsen's 10 usability heuristics. Experts documented usability issues for each heuristic and rated their severity on a scale from 0 (not a problem) to 4 (catastrophic problem). Through our analysis, we (PT, NE) identified three cross-cutting themes: 1) Poor design, where experts noted the absence of undo or delete buttons, making navigation challenging, and the distracting color scheme on graphs; 2) Data visualization issues, with experts expressing difficulty interpreting charts and uncertainty about what is considered ideal or good communication. One expert said “It's unclear what is considered ideal/good…for each gauge chart, high interactivity, engagement, and warmth I would assume are ideal/good. But how the charts are displayed in the system I cannot know for certain”; 3) Ambiguity in information presentation, where experts sought more definitions for measured social dimensions and recommended training links to help them identify personal actions they can take to improve their communication. This study underscores the value of incorporating expert feedback and addressing usability issues to improve tools like ConverSense to address implicit bias and promote equitable patient-provider interactions.

Despite Washington's status as the 10th richest state in the nation, it is ranked 34th in food security. In the South Puget Sound region, rural areas lack transportation and food access, and the need for food aid has increased significantly since 2020. The goal of the present project is to contrast models for food aid with attention to inclusivity and well-being. At the beginning of a year-long internship at GoodRoots Northwest, a food bank located in Bonney Lake, I applied my training as a psychology student to explore best practices for inclusive food access to promote the psychological well-being of its customers. In my mixed-methods study, I first employed a case study of the GoodRoots Northwest Market. In conjunction with a review of the research literature on food justice, I will illuminate the practices of inclusivity that promote psychological well-being in this context. For example, availability of culturally inclusive items like specialty meats, and the way visual presentation in the context communicates availability rather than a scarcity mindset. Furthermore, I plan to collect quantitative data from GoodRoots Northwest that identifies specific practices, such as an online food ordering system, to demonstrate the access created through innovative approaches. The goal of this project is to demonstrate the efficacy of innovative practices to promote food security. The findings from the project can exemplify the centrality of dignity and psychological well-being for food aid programs.

Turkey in Seattle, an ongoing oral history project initiated in 2017 under the auspices of the Turkish & Ottoman Studies Program at MELC, seeks to document the lives and stories of the Pacific Northwest’s vibrant Turkish community. The project's focus is on the immigration stories of people from Turkey—delving into their reasons for immigration, identity, adaptation to American culture, community involvement, and return migration plans. By cataloging their stories into a publicly available database, the project aims to record, archive, and preserve the oral histories of people who immigrated from Turkey to the Pacific Northwest (PNW) Region in the United States, creating a digital library and datasets that can be used for future research. The project has existed in three distinct stages. Phase one began with the lead researcher, Melike Yücel-Koc, as the sole interviewer. Interviews were only conducted with first generation immigrants. Phase two continued the focus yet had additional research interns, and phase three (the project's current phase) has begun interviewing second generation immigrants. I, in partnership with Turkey in Seattle, conducted over 15 of these oral history interviews over the span of 10 months, starting in phase two of the project. This process began in a training stage in Honors 345, Fall quarter 2022. After careful analysis of past oral history projects and review of previous interviews conducted for the project, I began to conduct interviews the following quarter. Interviews were conducted for a period from 1-2.5 hours, and followed oral history best practices. My presentation will discuss the methodology, process, and results gathered throughout my research, with a heavy focus on the practical applications. Beyond this, I will discuss the unique mindset that oral history demands of its practitioners and how it has proved invaluable to discussing the story of the PNW Turkish community.

The use of space to represent abstract concepts is integral to how humans understand and process the world around them. This study is interested in the Western tendency to organize abstract information on a left-to-right basis. This includes the organization of temporal information (the mental timeline) as well as numerical information (the mental number line). Researchers have examined this phenomenon in conjunction with Western left-to-right writing systems and have hypothesized that the development of the mental timeline and number line is strengthened as writing and reading experiences develop. The present study seeks to examine the effects of early literacy skills on the development of the mental timeline and number line, as well as compare how children organize temporal and numerical information. Preschool-aged children (N=24, aged 3.5-4 years, data collection is ongoing) were presented with three cards that either featured events in a story (temporal activity) or different quantities (numerical activity). Participants were then asked to arrange these cards in order of first to last for the temporal activity and smallest to biggest for the numerical activity. Participants also participated in a Concepts of Print assessment to assess their early literacy skills. The number of LTR lines created was compared to Concepts of Print score. Temporal sequences were most commonly represented through left-to-right lines and numerical sequences were most commonly arranged non-linearly, with neither suggesting an association with early literacy. These findings raise further questions on the origins of the mental timeline and number line, as well as imply that literacy skills are not the sole contributor to this development. In examining how literacy skills may contribute to enhancing spatial cognitive abilities related to spatial representation prominent in STEM subjects, we can reevaluate the traditional dichotomy between the arts and STEM fields.

Affordable housing has recently emerged as a central focus of many policymakers’ agendas, especially in big cities, and they have implemented a variety of reforms to address this. In Seattle, the Mandatory Housing Affordability (MHA) program was rolled out in 2017, and then implemented citywide in 2019. The MHA created zones within the city, with new developments in MHA zones required to either build a certain number of rent-restricted affordable housing units for low-income people, or pay into a fund for affordable housing. Studies have shown mixed impacts of programs like the MHA on the housing supply; research about the impacts of such programs on housing and especially rent prices, however, is limited. Additionally, there is evidence that the effects of such policies are heterogeneous, varying by location and other factors. In this paper, I test for changes in rent and housing prices in Seattle overall using a difference-in-differences analysis. I also test for spatial variation within Seattle in these rent and housing prices by comparing MHA zones with non-MHA zones. The implications of these results will be important in addressing the next steps in housing policy. Since the MHA was a novel program in the inclusionary housing policy space, analyzing its effectiveness is crucial to determining how future policies should be shaped.