Marvelous research projects conducted by the AP Research students

What topic would you choose to investigate for the entire school year?

The first year of AP Research at SMIC-I is filled with creativity and innovation. Students in this course aspire to conduct a yearlong research project on their chosen topics, in order to further develop their interests. Each topic is unique and focuses on various fields, including music, marriage, psychology, and so on. The class also gives students the freedom to be ingenious and inventive.

“I do like the freedom I get in this class to manage all the time myself and to concentrate on a topic of interest,” said Gracier Dai (12C).

AP Research, the course that follows AP Seminar, is the second course of the AP Capstone program. Students are expected to use the knowledge they learned in the previous course, such as inquiry and analysis skills, when conducting their research. In fact, the final AP grade is based on the quality of students’ 4000 to 5000 word academic paper and performance on their oral defense presentation. In addition, students are also encouraged to start brainstorming their projects during summer in order to have a better understanding of the direction they want to take in their research. In this class the teacher acts as a research advisor who checks students’ research progress and gives feedback to help students to make improvements on their papers. All in all, AP Research allows students to start developing valuable academic research and acquire skills that will be beneficial in the future.

Each of the AP Research students has different objectives and motivations for their projects as well. Vicky Zhang (12B) is working on a research that examines the correlation between parental marital status and SMIC highschool students’ likelihood of dating and marriage expectations. She believes that the positive quality of parents’ marital status is correlated to a lower possibility of dating and higher expectation of marriage. She also hopes that her study will be able to reveal the relationship between marriage of parents and that of their offspring.

“I find it interesting that some of my friends look forward to relationships and marriage, while others wince when I mention the topic. I wonder what factors propel others to think differently,” said Vicky.

Yiyun Wu (12A) is investigating the role that music plays in people’s lives and how engaging music influences people in different ways. She started selecting topics by researching fields she is interested in such as film, music, psychology, and theater. She believes that her project will be able to add to the existing knowledge base of the field. “I aim to find out how learning to appreciate art and beauty can help people grow into persons of character and healthy individuals,” said Yiyun.

Gracier’s project focuses more on the psychology of teenagers. She is researching on the possible conditions where theself-perceived worth of SMIC-I high school students, particularly sophomores and juniors, act as a shield against the deprecating peer-pressure to conform. She states that she often observes the student body at SMIC-I high school department and found a connection among competence, intelligence, productivity, and confidence. Gracier also hypothesizes that smart people who passionately work on extracurricular activities or explore their new interests are the ones who are least affected by peer pressure. Gracier commented that she “also want[s] to find out ways certain high schoolers maintain their stable self-worth because having a decent self-esteem is important to mental wellbeing, especially for adolescents.”

At this current stage, Gracier expresses her worries regarding making good survey questions that allow participants to answer honestly. She states that because asking about self-esteem can be a sensitive subject, she needs to phrase her questions without showing her purpose to the participants.

AP Research students are looking forward to completing their research and presenting the results to the public.

Featured Image “Research Photo” Courtesy of Fintech News

by Selina Tai