Students present research at national conference

Jamestown College senior psychology students Samantha Myhre of Sheyenne and Marci Spaeth of Mahnomen, Minn., were selected to present posters at the National Conference for Undergraduate Research March 31-April 2 at Ithaca (N.Y.) College.

Myhre presented “Employment and Grades: Does Working Pay Off?” and Spaeth presented “The Effects of Extraversion and Marijuana Use on Academic Success.” Both students began working on the projects during their junior year for a statistics and experimental design class.
Myhre’s study was designed to test the nature of the relationship between paid employment, gender and grade point average.

“The analysis (results of surveying 66 Jamestown College students) revealed that neither working nor gender has an overall effect on GPA, but there is a marginally significant interaction,” she says in her abstract. “Females who work appear to have higher GPAs than females who do not work, and males who work 20 or more hours a week have the lowest GPA. Gender differences between the rationales for working while attending college full-time are discussed as the potential reason for the interaction.”

Spaeth analyzed survey results measuring age, gender, introversion/extraversion, conscientiousness, frequency of marijuana use, and cumulative grade point average of 65 college students.

 “Results revealed that in general extraverted individuals have a significantly higher GPA than introverted individuals,” she says in her abstract. “It was also found that nonusers had a significantly higher GPA than marijuana users. Lastly, although it was not significant, there was a trend that suggests introverted marijuana users had a lower GPA than extraverted marijuana users.”

The National Conference on Undergraduate Research is the largest such symposium in the country, bringing together 2,000 undergraduate students from all fields and disciplines.