Wilka Rosario
My name is Wilka Rosario and I am a McNair Scholar at Rhode Island College (RIC). I am in my last year of undergraduate studies with plans to go to graduate school for my Ph.D. I live about twenty minutes from RIC in a town called Central Falls that constitutes just one squared mile filled with Hispanics and other people of color. I have lived in Central Falls with my grandparents and brother since I was nine. After finishing elementary school, I went to middle school, and then Central Falls High School. While, in high school I joined the Upward Bound program which provides support and aid to first-generation, low-income high school students. Joining the Upward Bound program was one of the best decisions I made academically because it is what led to me becoming a student at RIC as well as a McNair Scholar. It was difficult being an Upward Bound scholar because no one in my family understood what it meant and why I had to give up twelve weeks or so of my summer to go live on campus, and take classes every summer while I was in high school. I did not have much support but my family offered the best they had. I am a McNair Scholar now and plan to advance my education because I want to educate my family as much as I can so they never say to me, “I do not understand why you are going to school for more years.” I will pay back my grandmother all of her efforts and the work that she has given my brother and me. I want to demonstrate to her that her sacrifice of not returning to her home country to be with her mother was not for nothing. I am planning on getting a Ph.D. in Clinical Psychology because I want to contribute to the clinical research field with a special focus on Veterans and people that have posttraumatic stress disorder because I believe that there is not enough help for veterans in society.
For my research project, I am working with Doctor Megan Sumeracki on retrieval-based practice. My research project is titled Retrieval Practice and Free Recall among High School Students. My project is an extension of other retrieval practices research that Dr. Sumeracki has worked on over the years with students. We will be working with Upward Bound students to examine conditions and ways that student study to recall information and about which study methods are more effective than others. The results of this study will contribute to which conditions are more effective and beneficial for students to study.
ABSTRACT: Retrieval practice is the act of bringing information to mind and has been shown to help students learn. Conditions to practice retrieval are free recall (bringing any information to mind) and prompted recall (students will recall using the prompts to aid them). For this research, we will be exploring free recall and prompts as a way of practicing retrieval on high school students from the Upward Bound program at Rhode Island College. It will be a mixed design. For retrieval practice it will be within-subjects and for the type of retrieval it will be between-subjects. Participants will either read from four different texts or read-only for control. Next, students will complete a reading comprehension test. Then, students will be given the second text to read, and will participate in the second within-subjects condition in their experimental version. After, students will complete the speed of processing test. Later on, participants will return to take a final short-answer assessment test to measure learning and will complete the demographic questions as well. We hypothesized that students will practice retrieval better with prompts than with free recall and that it will lead to a better performance on the later test.
