Candace Gross, a 2007 Northwestern graduate, has won third place in the Psi Chi/Allyn & Bacon Prize for Undergraduate Research competition. Gross, from Parker, S.D., will receive $350 for her award-winning senior thesis research, “Epistemology, Self-Concept, and Need for Achievement as Predictors of Academic Achievement and Honors Participation.”
The awards competition, sponsored by Allyn & Bacon Publishers, is open to all undergraduates who are members of Psi Chi, the national honor society in psychology. The competition recognizes the best overall empirical research papers. The abstracts of the winning papers, as well as photographs and brief biographies of the top three winners, will be published in Eye on Psi Chi, the honor society’s magazine.
Gross’ research also was named the best paper at April’s Siouxland Undergraduate Social Science Research Conference in Sioux City. In May, she and Dr. Laird Edman, associate professor of psychology, presented this research at the annual Association for Psychological Science conference in Washington, D.C.
In April, Gross presented a paper at the national conference of the American Educational Research Association in Chicago. The paper, “Gifted Adolescents’ Overexcitabilities and Self-Concepts: An Analysis of Gender and Grade Level,” was written by Gross in collaboration with Dr. Anne Rinn from Western Kentucky University (WKU) and fellow student researcher Kelly Jamieson of Xavier University, as the result of their research project on gifted students at WKU last summer. That paper is also published in the summer 2007 edition of The Roeper Review, the flagship journal for talented and gifted research.
Gross will begin pursuit of an educational specialist degree in the school psychology program at the University of South Dakota in September.
