Student OSCAR expo presentations can be viewed digitally

The coronavirus pandemic didn’t keep over 30 students from developing poster presentations, research papers and other projects to be showcased virtually at Fredonia’s 23rd annual OSCAR Student Research and Creativity Exposition in April.

All 28 projects can be viewed online. The link lists each project by title and includes an explanation or summary, names of the student(s) who completed the project and faculty mentor and a copy of the student-produced poster or the student’s actual oral presentation.

“The interest was there among the students; I thought the projects were really outstanding this year, so that was really good,” said SUNY Distinguished Service Professor Jack Croxton, who directs the Office of Student Creative Activity and Research (OSCAR). Despite many challenges students faced to develop projects due to COVID-19 restrictions, Dr. Croxton believes the expo was very successful.

College of Education Professor Kathleen Gradel provided technical assistance for carrying out the expo’s virtual format, setting up Padlet, a collaborative software to upload, organize and share content, that students utilized to submit their posters.

Psychology was the most represented academic area of study among the student projects, followed by Biology, Music and English. Some projects were undertaken independently of a course, while others were compiled as research for a course and later adapted to a poster presentation format.

Student projects included: “Gender, Socioeconomic Status and Political Ideologies,” “Parental Responsiveness in Conversations with Their Preschoolers,” “The Urban Toolkit: 9 Successful Tools and Tips for Urban Music Ed. Classrooms” and “Comparison of Freshwater Closed Ecological Systems Collected from Local Freshwater Habitats.”

New this year at the expo was the use of Google meet rooms, which allowed those viewing a poster to talk informally, at a designated time, with the student who created the presentation, much like what’s always been done in past in-person expos held in the Williams Center Multipurpose Room.

This was the second year in a row for the expo to have a virtual format due to the pandemic, which suspended nearly all in-person events usually held on campus starting in March 2020.

A survey of participating students found uniformly that the OSCAR expo was one of the best undergraduate experiences that the students have had, Croxton reported. “They felt that they had learned a lot and had a great opportunity to apply knowledge that they gained in the classroom and commented very favorably on their mentor who helped in carrying out the project,” Croxton said.

A large number of participating students also submitted their projects to the SUNY Undergraduate Research Conference, so Fredonia was well-represented there, Croxton added.

Compiling an undergraduate research project and actually presenting it at an expo can be very helpful to students who plan to apply to graduate school, Croxton said.