UC High freshman, sophomores and juniors were given the opportunity to volunteer to participate in the Listen Lab, a student-driven project in conjunction with UCSD, that will eventually provide funds for campus projects aimed at creating a more welcoming campus where students want to attend.

The Listen Lab is a three-year long project coordinated by Dr. Susan Yonezawa and researchers at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD) that will examine ways to improve school engagement for more students. The UC High teacher liaisons will be Resource Teacher Kristina Medina and ASB Advisor Samantha Cruz.

Medina said, “The UCSD Listen Lab is a collaborative project between UC High and several other schools in the San Diego Unified School District. It’s a research based collaboration that allows students to be in charge of research and to create innovative solutions to problems that they see on campus around why students might engage or disengage in school.” Cruz added, “Basically, it’s a program that centers students and student voices to address what they believe needs to be fixed here at UC or what needs to be tackled.”

While over 200 students volunteered to participate, only eighty students were invited to participate in the program, according to Cruz. Of those UC High Students participating in this lab, half will be invited to be on an active research team, where meetings will happen at the school site during or after school hours. The other half will participate in the non-active team. Students were selected to participate and were placed on teams using a random selection tool provided by UCSD.

“It’s a really good opportunity for students to become researchers and actually have the experience of being in charge. It’s going to look really great on resumes, job applications, college applications, and will overall be a great opportunity for students to become leaders,” said Medina. “It puts the ownership on them and the decision making in their hands,” added Cruz. According to the assent to act form given to participants, the investigators the investigators “may identify ways to improve instructional practices, school counseling and administrative practices, and society may benefit from this knowledge.”

Adding on to the consent form that needed to be signed by parents, “This will take approximately 3 to 4 months of the school year” and “will take 35 hours with bi-weekly meetings.” “The whole program will have 16 meetings and will go through four different phases where we will figure out what the problem is, create research questions, do the research, gather the data, analyze the data, and come up with some solutions,” said Medina.

“The main objective is for students to be able to learn how to identify an issue and create a solution that is able to be implemented,” said Cruz. “The objectives are to give students an opportunity to become ‘student researchers’ and to give them the opportunity to be leaders in a research project,” said Medina.

Cruz said, “UCSD was looking to partner with any high schools in the immediate area and Ms. Medina and I decided that it’s something that we wanted to be a part of and support students’ voices here at UC High. So we went ahead and said, ‘Sure, we’ll do it’.”