Abilene university students offer research projects on varying topics

Abilene Christian University senior Virginia Pettit kept running into frustrated, confused and clueless students while working in the university's Maker Lab.

They didn't know how to run the lab's 3D printer and were coming to her for answers to basic questions. Some needed to know how to turn it on, even.

So, Pettit wrote a basic manual attempting to answer all of the printer's procedures.

She didn't stop there, though. She tested it on some of the lab's attendees, providing some of them with the manuals as they came through the door, while others were left without.

Interviewing the participants afterwards, she found the results matched what she would expect.

"I really found three things," Pettit said. "One, they needed less help from the staff if they had the (instructions). I found that they were more explorative with the software, and they also expressed more feelings of accomplishment."

Pettit's project was one of 32 undergraduate student presentations given during ACU's 10th annual research festival, which featured some of the best student research of the school year.

Students from Abilene's other four-year universities were also invited to present their findings, with categories in either STEM — science, technology, engineering and math — like Pettit's project, or in sociology.

The latter category is where the team of Tori Williford, Jenny Shaw, Allison Kuster, Carlo Serna and Samuel Rosenblad — Hardin-Simmons University students — focused their efforts. Their research looked into whether there's a correlation between personality type and theological beliefs.

Sampling 239 students and faculty from two universities (HSU and Southern Nazarene University in Bethany, Oklahoma), team members studied results from numerous kinds of personality tests and compared the information to how the participants identified on intensity of religious beliefs.

They said the research showed individuals who identified as honest and having humility, agreeable and open to new experiences were all identifiable on the scale of religious belief, at least in part.

"There is some correlation," Rosenblad said. "For honesty and agreeableness, we found more fundamentalist belief corresponds with higher numbers. We also found openness was inversely related, meaning those who were more fundamental were less open to trying new things."

The group recognized the limits of their experimentation, too. Their sample of students, for instance, was taken from two Christian-affiliated universities.

Finding a more diverse range, from looking at public universities to finding different religions, might give them different results, Serna said.

"This says more about where we're at," he said. "We might get different results if we looked at a public school, like the University of Texas, Texas Tech."

While Pettit's research was to determine a need and the HSU group's was to examine a possibility, a third group of students spent their research project trying to find out if they could do something.

Meagan Benson, John Siroin and Jonathan Jasper, all ACU students, attempted to identify DNA differences in a rodent species one of their professors is credited with identifying.

The species Thomasomys, a group of about 30-40 rodents found primarily in South America, are being studied at a genetic level and the students were trying to find out where they split off along the evolutionary road.

"We're essentially trying to reconstruct the family tree," Jasper said. "We want to see where one split off from another."