Faculty: Dr. Shawn Bergman

Team Leads: Brenna McNamara and Claire Parson

Description: The Foundations of Career Understanding in Psychology Students (FOCUS) team develops practical solutions to challenges faced by the psychology department while also educating psychology majors about their employable skills and potential career paths to combat underemployment.

Main project:

The team will be exploring ways to incorporate Artificial Intelligence (AI) into an ongoing project that measures what levels of knowledge, skills, and abilities (KSAs) are gained from courses in the psychology major at App State. The existing project involves having faculty members rate KSA levels an average student should gain in their course and inputting that data into a website called “Eugene” where students can select courses and view KSAs and jobs they may qualify for. AI improvements would simplify this process by, for example, having professors provide their syllabi to an AI and having the tool provide KSA levels. We hope that this would eventually allow us to expand our reach to majors and minors outside of psychology. 

Additional focus:

• Finishing ratings for Eugene website

  • Last year, we held meetings where we had professors discuss their ratings for skills that are expected to be gained from the courses they teach. We will be finishing up these last few remaining meetings.

Faculty: Dr. Kristl Davison, Dr. Jess Doll, Dr. Tim Huelsman

Team Leads: Leah Uteg-Winkelman and Hannah Wallace

Description: Organizational Culture Insights Team explores how values, behaviors, and structures shape group dynamics in real-world organizations. We collaborate on meaningful research, gain hands-on experience, and contribute to a deeper understanding of workplace culture.

Project 1: Well-being and Belonging: This research aims to investigate how a sense of belonging within corporate environments influences employee well-being, including mental health, job satisfaction, and work-life balance. The study addresses a growing interest in understanding the non-financial benefits of fostering inclusive and supportive corporate cultures and how they contribute to overall employee well-being.

Project 2: Career Websites: Job Seekers Intentions and Perceptions

The research aims to evaluate whether job seekers are visiting career websites to glean information and insights about an organization’s values. If they do, are the job seekers' perception realistic to the organizational values?

Faculty: Dr. Shawn Bergman and Dr. Timothy Ludwig

Team Leads: Madalyn Stephens and Drew Sipe

Description: Safety team uses safety data to show organizations how to potentially save lives. To do so we have meetings with organizations safety professionals, and are currenlty partnered with a Marathon Petroleum oil refinery. We take their safety data, perform data cleaning, data analysis, and present our findings to influence safety practices. If you want to learn occupational Safety, learn data analytics in R, work with real organizational data, and present to a real client, then this is a great research team to join! 

Project 1: Replicating the Impact of Observations on Injury Probability: We will be replicating previous findings on the effect of behavior based observations on reducing injury probability, this shows organizations that safety reporting is effective, and a good use of resources. To do so we will use a Rolling Sum Time Series Logistic Regression, after we ensure all safety data is clean. We will also explore different types of regression to improve model accuracy in the second semester. 

Project 2: Reducing Injury Probability: We will be performing analytics to single out different factors to reduce injury probability beyond observations to answer the questions of what can we do to reduce injury rates? To do so we will focus on multi-level modeling, and use more safety, HR, and production factors to examine more safety outcomes.

Project 3: Text Analytics on Observations and Injuries: This team will use R and Python to pull qualitative data out of text responses in Injury, Observation, and Audit data. In the first semester we will focus on using AI to label observations and audits based on the kinds of behaviors that are observed and see what has the greatest relation to injury probability. In the second semester we will focus on sentiment analysis, and see which sentiments are most related to injuries.