The Thesis Honors Program at Tufts allows seniors to lead an in-depth investigation into an area of research within their major. Over the course of both semesters in their senior year, students conduct an independent study of their choosing. Undergraduates from across all majors and disciplines undertake senior honors theses. Graduating seniors Ashley Lopez and Nikita Bhatnagar dedicated their theses to multilingual research.
Lopez is double majoring in biology as well as child study and human development. Interested in pediatric health, Lopez pursued both majors in order to better understand child development. Lopez wrote her senior thesis on the teaching practices that young educators use with English language learners in Head Start preschools, which are federally funded to support children from low-income families in their learning and development.
“There’s very little training or regulation when it comes to what strategies teachers use for ELL students. They could really do whatever they want; they could ignore the student, isolate them,” Lopez said. “A lot of teachers put [ELLs] aside, give them another activity, let them wander around the classroom.”
Lopez’s perspective is informed by her firsthand experience as a Jumpstart Corps member at a Head Start preschool. Jumpstart is a supplemental early childhood education program that connects volunteer instructors with federally funded preschool programs to “close the kindergarten readiness gap” for low-income families. Twenty-one Tufts students participate in a partnership with several infant and toddler preschool programs around Boston, working as Head Start teachers to provide supplemental instruction in the classrooms of partner schools.
“A very big chunk of the students in Head Start are ELLs,” Lopez said. “I started to pick up on a trend where there was no consistency in what teachers were doing with their ELL students, especially in the classrooms that were a little bit bigger. … I was wondering: Is there anything behind their practices? Especially because [ELLs are] such a big population, and this population is just going to grow.”
To investigate this question, Lopez conducted a qualitative study featuring in-depth interviews with Jumpstart Corps members. Her initial survey, answered by 20 out of the 21 Tufts students in the cohort, asked about teaching practices, the number of ELLs in their classrooms and their future career ambitions.
“A lot of the Jumpstart members I interviewed … mentioned that [they] would love to teach, but the pay is bad, and so a lot of them — in response to that — are doing psychology,” Lopez said. “A lot of them are [pursuing] school psychology, just in general, like a clinical psychologist for children.”
In addition to these interviews, her thesis included stories about working with ELL students. Lopez shared an anecdote about working with an ELL student from Ethiopia.
“He did not speak very much English, but he was so bubbly and really wanting to interact with everyone, even if he couldn’t speak to them,” Lopez said. “In the playground, whenever he wanted to play tag with kids … he would scream at the top of his lungs and start running. And kids would just either chase him or run away from him. Even though he couldn’t [verbally] communicate that he wanted to play, he still found a way.”
Lopez will be attending the Tufts University School of Medicine in the fall to pursue her goal of becoming a physician.
Bhatnagar is double majoring in biology and community health. Bhatnagar is a member of the Research on Ethics, Aging, and Community Health Lab at Tufts and worked as a clinical care technician on an oncology floor at Tufts Medical Center. Her senior thesis in the Department of Community Health focused on palliative care provision in patients who don’t speak English, often referred to as patients with non-English language preferences.
“Palliative care is a specialized care for anyone with serious illnesses like cancer, heart disease, Alzheimer’s,” Bhatnagar said. “There’s a lot of symptom management, and managing financial, psychosocial and emotional needs.”
Bhatnagar chose to focus on patients with non-English language preferences — who tend to be racial and ethnic minorities — because they are more vulnerable to care disparities. Working as a clinical care technician, Bhatnagar experienced the challenges of communicating with patients with non-English language preferences.
“I was very observant and aware of how it felt to communicate with those patients and how it was a challenge for me, not even being a doctor,” Bhatnagar said. “I was always curious: How are these conversations going in a different language? It’s so distressing to see and hear; you would walk by a room, and patients are crying, and none of them speak English. I was very cognizant of that and wanted to better understand that.”
Her thesis looks at how clinicians feel while providing care to patients with non-English language preferences and whether or not they think that their care has the same quality as that provided to English-speaking patients.
“Just the presence of an interpreter, irrespective of the modality or who it is, means that the conversations are more stilted. You don’t get the flow and back and forth that you would with English-speaking patients. Getting people’s preferences with less nuance is something that’s a problem,” Bhatnagar said in regards to her findings.
Bhatnagar’s committee chair, the primary advisor responsible for overseeing progress on the development of a thesis, was Keren Ladin, an associate professor in the Department of Community Health. Ladin is the director of the Research on Ethics, Aging, and Community Health Lab and first met Bhatnagar as a student in Community Health 141.
“CH 141 is an applied research class in which [students] get hands-on exposure and hands-on experience directly on one of our projects,” Ladin said. “It’s a really great avenue for students who are really interested in research but … need some more guidance or experience to begin working directly on studies.”
Bhatnagar, who plans to attend the Tufts University School of Medicine in the fall, joined the Research on Ethics, Aging, and Community Health Lab as a clinical research assistant in 2022, where she has investigated disparities in how clinicians provide care.
“Our research is at the intersection of ethics and health policy, looking at questions of resource allocation and distribution, priority setting; questions around shared decision making; and questions around how to improve patient-centered care,” Ladin said about the lab. “Our lab does a lot of research with populations who face acute healthcare decisions at the end of life.”
Ladin encourages anyone interested in pursuing a thesis to expand their curiosity and hone their skills by embarking on this project.
“I think students sometimes are hesitant about doing a thesis; they’re concerned that it’s a big time commitment and challenging … but it is such a rewarding process,” Ladin said. “It’s a really unique opportunity to take something from the stage of an idea or a question, and see it through to fruition.”
