E.O. Smith high schoolers learn about big data at Eastern NASA CT funded project exposes students to STEM

E.O. Smith students study with Eastern Professors Fatma Pakdil and Steve Muchiri on a STEM project funded by a NASA-CT Space Grant.

This summer, Eastern Connecticut State University hosted 11 students from E.O. Smith High School in Mansfield to conduct research on hospital data at Eastern for the second year in a row. The project, led by business administration Professor Fatma Pakdil and economics and finance Professor Steve Muchiri, was backed by a monetary award from the NASA-CT Space Grant.

Pakdil explained that Eastern has been awarded by the NASA-CT Space Grant several times over the years, and this marks the second consecutive year that they've applied it to data research for high schoolers. The program's purpose was to draw student interest toward STEM-related fields.

"We are thankful for the grant because it enables us to reach out to high schoolers, work with them and hopefully help them open their horizons in STEM-related matters," she said.

According to Pakdil, there is a shortage of high schoolers pursuing STEM fields due to a lack of confidence and awareness. "Many students believe they won't be comfortable with math in college because they were not comfortable with it in high school, so they avoid STEM-related fields," she explained. "Another reason for the shortages is that students are not fully aware of what STEM majors entail."

Last year, students analyzed databases and different hypotheses concerning the correlation between the length of a hospital patient's stay and the rates at which pneumonia patients are readmitted.This year's research expanded into chronic obstructive pulmonary diseases (COPD) in the last decade using the same dataset.

Pakdil's hypotheses examined factors influencing COPD patients' hospital stay lengths and readmission rates, including gender, medical conditions, insurance type, socioeconomic status and several other variables related to hospital economics and patient conditions.

According to Pakdil, students successfully picked up on trends and exemplified data analysis skills and cognitive reasoning that are vital in STEM fields.

"The (students) learned how to run an academic and scientific research project. They also learned how to analyze big data in healthcare and interpret data analysis results," she said.

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