Joshua Castro – 12
At HAHS, students have many opportunities to participate in open-ended learning activities. Moreover, many classes offer research-based projects to help students engage with their material on a deeper level. Still, when students carry out research, they often do not share the results with those who may be curious. Many have not experienced a vital part of the scientific method, showing off the data, so their results should get a chance to be expressed to a wider audience.
Brayden Bailey is a senior who took the school’s Psychology class last year, and during that time, he did a research project on phobias. He wanted to see which fears would be more common in the student population. To gather data, he sent a survey asking how people reacted to common types of phobias. It used a checklist with different intensities of anxiety to see if the person responding to the survey had a particular fear. Brayden then organized the data into a visual presentation to show to his class and share the results. His survey got 11 responses in total, and he found that the most common fear was claustrophobia, or the fear of tight spaces. It was followed by the fear of spiders, arachnophobia, and the fear of public speaking, glossophobia. Overall, the research went smoothly for Brayden, though he did experience difficulty when a friend tried to sabotage his survey by saying that cats made them “extremely anxious.”
This year, more students took HAHS’s Psych course, including senior Joshua Castro. He chose to do a research project to examine if there was a correlation between food and reaction time. He gathered information with a small group of participants by using a website called HumanBenchmark to check how fast one could click a box when it changed from red to green. He then did the same test one or two hours after the experimenter had eaten lunch to see if there was any change. Lastly, he put the results in a presentation to show to his class. The reaction times of eight participants were measured, and Josh found that the reaction times slowed down by an average of twelve milliseconds after lunch. In all, Joshua Castro found the research to be insightful, which could change people’s views of lunch and its effects on students.
