As a first-year doctoral student preparing for a career as a professor, Marissa Bamberger is off to a tremendous start.
Bamberger, who is pursuing her Ph.D. in Educational Psychology, already has netted her first published research in the Social Science Journal.
Writing with Todd Reeves, associate professor in the Department of Educational Technology, Research and Assessment, Bamberger and her mentor examined “Individual and Contextual Factors Associated with Data Sharing in the Social Sciences.”
Published in October, the article began as a class project in ETR 522: Educational Statistics II.
“It spoke to me as a topic,” says Bamberger, who aspires to help college faculty improve the education of undergraduates and believes data sharing is part of that mission. “It’s really great to have this under my belt now. I hadn’t done something like this. I had conducted research before, but that was creating a poster for conferences.”
She credits Reeves for “being a guiding presence in every single step of the process,” which also included learning how to select a journal for submission, responding to the feedback of the editors and determining what suggestions to address.
Reeves is impressed with the outcome.
“Marissa keenly understands that for those on an academic trajectory, authorship of peer-reviewed, empirical journal articles is paramount. These articles are the fundamental ‘unit’ of scientific knowledge. And as a faculty member, I believe it is my responsibility to closely shepherd students like Marissa through the publication process,” Reeves says.
“Her course project was outstanding, but in working together afterward we were able to take it up a notch with structural equation modeling,” he says. “This allowed us to explore more complex structural relations among the variables and more rigorously validate measurement decisions she had made.”
Their manuscript proved strong through “its emphasis on not only generating new knowledge, but also replicating the findings of earlier work,” Reeves adds. “There is a well-known replicability problem in the social sciences, and Marissa understands that it is as important to circle back and validate prior findings as it is to produce something ‘novel.’ ”
For Bamberger, who declares on her LinkedIn page that she has “always had a passion for making a difference in students’ lives,” the achievement is just the latest step in her journey toward that goal.
She earned a bachelor’s degree in Psychology at North Central College in 2019, coming to DeKalb afterward to complete her M.S. in Educational Research and Evaluation.
North Central professors provided “much more support” than the Plainfield native had expected, collaborating with her on research projects and giving her the tools to succeed in graduate school.
“I want to pay that forward, and that’s why I’m passionate to find ways to help students to achieve their dreams,” Bamberger says.
“Earning a Ph.D., I will be able to do much like what the faculty I’ve had did,” she adds, “to not only teach, which is important to me, but continuing to improve the way I teach and, in the future, the people I work with in order to improve what these students are actually learning coming out of the classes.”
Bamberger also hopes to mentor students as she was, introducing them to research.
Her personal topic of interest is the misconceptions surrounding psychology, such as the mistaken notion that humans use only 10% of their brains.
“Some students come in the intro section with all these myths that they have learned, in a way, from the towns they’ve lived and the schools there, or from family and friends,” she says. “The worst part is that they leave the intro class with a lot of those still in place. A lot of the teaching going on in these intro classes is not correcting these myths – and then they keep going, and that could be the last psychology class they take.”
Looking ahead, Bamberger is working on publications from her master’s thesis on this misconception topic and will teach a research methods course for North Central’s Department of Psychology and Neuroscience this spring.
