Barrett, The Honors College Thesis/Creative Project Collection
Barrett, The Honors College at Arizona State University proudly showcases the work of undergraduate honors students by sharing this collection exclusively with the ASU community.
Barrett accepts high performing, academically engaged undergraduate students and works with them in collaboration with all of the other academic units at Arizona State University. All Barrett students complete a thesis or creative project which is an opportunity to explore an intellectual interest and produce an original piece of scholarly research. The thesis or creative project is supervised and defended in front of a faculty committee. Students are able to engage with professors who are nationally recognized in their fields and committed to working with honors students. Completing a Barrett thesis or creative project is an opportunity for undergraduate honors students to contribute to the ASU academic community in a meaningful way.
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- Creators: School of Life Sciences
- Creators: School of International Letters and Cultures
- Creators: O'Flaherty, Katherine
Many other studies have researched the benefits of digital manipulatives and digital environments through student completion of tasks and testing. This study intends to research students’ use of the digital tools and manipulatives, along with the students’ interactions with the digital environment. To this end, I conducted exploratory teaching experiments with two calculus I students.
In the exploratory teaching experiments, students were introduced to a GeoGebra application developed by Fischer (2019), which includes instructional videos and corresponding quizzes, as well as exercises and interactive notepads, where students could use digital tools to construct line segments and circles (corresponding to the physical straight-edge and compass). The application built up the students’ foundational knowledge, culminating in the construction and verbal proof of Euclid’s Elements, Proposition 1 (Euclid, 1733).
The central findings of this thesis are the students’ interactions with the digital environment, with observed changes in their conceptions of radii and circles, and in their use of tools. The students were observed to have conceptions of radii as a process, a geometric shape, and a geometric object. I observed the students’ conceptions of a circle change from a geometric shape to a geometric object, and with that change, observed the students’ use of tools change from a measuring focus to a property focus.
I report a summary of the students’ work and classify their reasoning and actions into the above categories, and an analysis of how the digital environment impacts the students’ conceptions. I also briefly discuss the impact of the findings on pedagogy and future research.
To determine if the disruption of the MMR pathway results in the reduced conservation of methylated adenines as well as an increased tolerance for mutations that result in the loss or gain of new GATC sites, we surveyed individual clones isolated from experimentally evolving wild-type and MMR-deficient (mutL- ;conferring an 150x increase in mutation rate) populations of E. coli with whole-genome sequencing. Initial analysis revealed a lack of mutations affecting methylation sites (GATC tetranucleotides) in wild-type clones. However, the inherent low mutation rates conferred by the wild-type background render this result inconclusive, due to a lack of statistical power, and reveal a need for a more direct measure of changes in methylation status. Thus as a first step to comparative methylomics, we benchmarked four different methylation-calling pipelines on three biological replicates of the wildtype progenitor strain for our evolved populations.
While it is understood that these methylated sites play a role in the MMR pathway, it is not fully understood the full extent of their effect on the genome. Thus the goal of this thesis was to better understand the forces which maintain the genome, specifically concerning m6A within the GATC motif.