10/16/2025
We’re so grateful to have had three students participating in our Children’s Research Lab this past summer on Trinity’s campus. Talia Rangel (‘26), Ellie Sculley (‘26), and Rebecca Stapleman (‘26) worked as part-time research assistants in Dr. Childers’ lab collecting data and collaborating with research labs across the globe on multiple unique study topics from testing when STEM engagement in engineering begins in children to developing stimuli to examine semantic priming effects in children’s verb learning. At the end of the summer, they had the opportunity to present their findings on multiple studies at the Trinity University Summer Symposium.
Ellie and Rebecca spent most of their time at the San Antonio Children Museum, the DoSeum, collecting data measuring children’s competence and interest in engineering, and coming back on campus to log and code the data. They focused on STEM identity development in children, measuring how a child’s perceptions of their competence and interest in science relates to their actual ability to perform a science task.
Talia focused on collaboration with labs internationally in Canada and the Netherlands on stimuli development for various studies to continue conducting once the school year restarted. This included a research project titled WAET (word association eye tracking) looking at trying to understand if how children associate words with one another through semantic networks, tracked by tracking children’s eyes. The study in collaboration with a lab in the Netherlands focuses on children’s ability to learn verbs when observing first person point of view and third person point of view videos.
Summer research at Trinity is a great opportunity for undergraduates to be able to conduct hands on research, work directly with distinguished professors, and present their hard work at the summer research symposium at the end of the summer to peers and faculty.