Department: Speech and Hearing Sciences; Psychiatry & Behavioral Sciences
Professors Greg Wallace, PhD; Lauren Kenworthy, PhD
The Project: Executive function (EF) is an omnibus term describing supramodal, higher-order cognitive abilities including working memory, planning, flexibility, and organization, all in the service of problem-solving and behavioral regulation. It is now well-established that EF skills are crucial to academic functioning in both typically developing children and at-risk youth from lower socioeconomic backgrounds. For example, early EF skills, including working memory and inhibitory control, have been linked with school readiness during early development (Blair & Razza, 2007). Later developing EF skills also foster academic achievement as several studies now demonstrate that individual differences in EF performance are associated with individual differences in academic functioning during adolescence (Latzman et al., 2010).
Nevertheless, in spite of this robust evidence for linkage between EF skills and academic achievement in typically developing and at-risk youth, to date, very little evidence links these domains in the context of autism spectrum disorder (ASD). This is particularly startling given that EF deficits based on both performance measures (e.g., McLean et al., 2014) and ratings scales (e.g., Granader et al., 2014) are well-established in ASD and that several interventions (e.g., Unstuck and On Target! Kenworthy et al., 2014) have been developed to target EF difficulties in the service of reducing ASD (e.g., repetitive behavior and rigidity) symptoms and buttressing other (e.g., social-communication) skills.
This study will assess EF skills utilizing a battery of EF tasks (assessing working memory, inhibitory control, cognitive flexibility, etc.) and examine their unique contributions (above and beyond IQ) to academic functioning, including reading and math. This study will include approximately 30 children with ASD and 30 typically developing controls matched on age (7-12 years old), IQ (>75), and sex ratio.
Tasks: The research assistant will help with a plethora of tasks including, but not limited to: gathering data/testing, data entry, data cleaning, data analysis, literature reviews, and writing.
Time Commitment/ Credit Hours: 4-6 hours per week; varies
To Apply: Please send a curriculum vitae or resume to Dr. Wallace at: gwallac1@gwu.edu
Month: May 2015
African Diaspora Project [Research Assistantship]
Professor Yvonne Captain
The Project: Researching the whereabouts and movement (migration) of African Diaspora communities in the Americas, including those who are descendants of slaves in the United States. Of special interest is the migration of Creoles of Louisiana to other parts of the United States and to other regions of the Americas.
Tasks:
–Mine archival data as recent as last year or as early as the 1720s.
–Research will occur mostly through GW online access or physically at the Library of Congress and other local libraries
–possible transcription of interviews that the professor conducted with participants
Time Commitment/ Credit: 7-9 hours per week; 3 credit opportunity
Contact Address: ycaptain@gwu.edu
To Apply: Email me know of your interest. Prior knowledge of the African Diaspora is not necessary. No language requirement except good skills in the English language. Can be less hours if you prefer. Let me know so that I can hire more than one assistant.
–let me know when you are available to do the work
–either at end of spring semester or beginning of summer
Christian Zionism in American Thought [Research Assistantship]
Department: Political Science
Professor Samuel Goldman
The Project: This project is an attempt to understand why American Christians have historically expressed such strong support for the idea of a Jewish state in some portion of the Biblical promised land. Focusing on public arguments in books, pamphlets, and sermons, it traces the discourse of Christian Zionism from the Puritans to the present day. I pay special attention to claims that the United States has a special role to play in establishing/supporting such a state. According to Christian Zionists, how is America’s destiny intertwined with Israel’s?
Tasks: The research assistant will help with the following tasks:
1) Locating and collecting primary sources in internet and library searches.
2) Verifying quotes and citations.
3) Proofreading manuscripts.
Time Commitment/ Credits: 1-3 hours per week; 1 credit
Contact Email: swgoldman@gwu.edu
To Apply: Applicants should send an unofficial transcript and a short statement indicating their background for or interest in this project, as well as any prior research experience.
Strategic Behavior by Federal Agencies in the Allocation of Public Resources [Research Assistantship]
Department: Trachtenberg School of Public Policy and Public Administration
Professor Stuart Kasdin
Description: Our project examines how federal agencies respond when there is a change in the partisan control of Congress. Do government agencies allocate program resources so as to best accomplish program goals, without regard to the political party affiliations of those in Congress? Or, perhaps they favor districts represented by the President’s party, or favor any districts whose congressional representatives are positioned to support the agency. Also, across government do federal agencies react differently, responding with varied strategies to a changing political environment?
We will examine the role of government agencies in resource allocation choices, focusing on how federal government agencies responded to the 1994 election, when control of Congress shifted from the Democratic Party to the Republican Party. In particular we will focus on the impact of the election on the agencies’ allocations of contracts. Do they respond to the election by allocating more contract resources to Republican districts?
Tasks: The student would do several things revolving primarily around data preparation. First, in a spreadsheet we need to determine the partisan affiliations of legislators in office in 1993 and in 1995. Next we need to get the data on contracts for a set of agencies. All of this data is available on-line. Subsequent data analysis will depend on the student’s quantitative background.
Time Commitment/ Credit Hour: 3 hours per week; 2 credit option
To Apply: Email a resume and relevant experience to skasdin@gwu.edu
A Reform to Help Congress Work Better [Research Assistantship]
Trachtenberg School of Public Policy and Public Administration
Professor Stuart Kasdin
The Project: This project involves historic research using the Congressional Record. The goal is to produce an academic paper, in which the student could receive shared authorship.
The paper would examine the potential impacts of a particular reform to the Congressional budget process: the reform is to merge appropriations and authorization committees. Presently, authorization committees design new programs, creating the terms for program spending (i.e., what a program aims to accomplish, who is eligible, and what they can receive), while the appropriation committees determine how much funding each program will receive. This proposal would do away with this long-standing bifurcation of responsibilities. Each newly designed committee would have a mix of mandatory and discretionary programs.
The greatest potential advantage of the reform proposal is to encourage greater productivity from the Congress. Because appropriations must be completed on an annual basis and because the funding process supports logrolling and ‘splitting the difference’, compromise is easier. The need to annually produce new budgets could encourage greater on-going cooperation, enhanced communication and trust, and less partisan posturing. In addition, the new committees would have all the relevant program spending (except tax expenditures) housed together. This would encourage increased allocative efficiency.
There are potential risks. One risk is that the appropriation bills would be later than usual, with partisanship from the authorization process spilling into appropriations. In addition, there is a risk of increased use of legislative riders and earmarks added to appropriation bills.
Because there are historical examples of congressional committees with combined authorization and appropriation responsibilities, we can get a better sense of the possible outcomes of the reform. Between 1879 and1885, the House of Representatives stripped the Appropriation Committee of its authority over rivers and harbors, agriculture, consular and diplomatic affairs, the military, the Post Office, and Indian affairs. In each of these areas the authorization committees gained the right to report appropriations. On the Senate side, by1899, a similarly broad swath of activities had been removed from the appropriator’s jurisdiction and placed under the responsibility of the relevant authorization committees. The Appropriation Committees only regained the responsibility for appropriations after the 1921 Budget and Accounting Act.
Research Assistant Tasks: You would examine the Congressional Record (which is on-line), comparing committees that made the change and combined authorization and appropriation functions, and committees that did not. In addition, the examination could cover the period of time several years before and after the changes in committee responsibilities. Some metrics to examine would include legislation introduced; public laws enacted and landmark, timeliness of appropriations, and a measure of altered appropriation bill content, such riders.
Time Commitment/Credit Hours: 4-6 hours per week (beginning Summer 2015); 2 credit option
Contact email: skasdin@gwu.edu
To Apply: Email a resume with major and a writing sample to the above address.
