2023

Rising Senior Integrates Coursework and Internship Experiences

Samantha Winegard ’24 brought the knowledge on chronic absenteeism she’d developed in a spring psychology course to a local nonprofit this summer.

By: Meghan Kita  Thursday, August 17, 2023 09:33 AM

Samantha Winegard ’24

In the spring, Samantha Winegard ’24, her Advanced Research in Psychology classmates and Professor of Psychology Stefanie Sinno worked with Hays Elementary School in the Allentown School District (ASD) to explore the causes and effects of chronic absenteeism among its students. This summer, she interned with the local nonprofit Communities in Schools of Eastern Pennsylvania, examining chronic absenteeism at a different ASD school.

“I knew that continuing my journey of understanding student chronic absenteeism at the elementary level was something I had to do,” says Winegard, a double major in psychology and public health. “I would be able to use my past knowledge and the new data to provide as much assistance for this community as possible.”

Her summer experience was facilitated through the Office of Community Engagement’s Community Internship Program, which offers students a stipend as they work with local communities at nonprofits, schools and government organizations. Her role involved working with student data at Central Elementary School, exploring correlations between frequency of attendance and standardized test scores, and then finding ways to communicate her findings to parents.

For example, she created a simple handout for parents to share one of her findings: that 63 percent of students who scored “below basic” or “basic” on their standardized math tests were chronically absent (missing 19 or more school days in a year). Only 38 percent of students to score “proficient” or “advanced” were chronically absent. Another handout she created was a grid on which students or parents could track the days they attended school and the days they missed.

“One of the other interns is calling parents to say ‘your child was chronically absent,’” Winegard says. “Some parents say, ‘Oh, I didn’t realize how many days they missed.’”

Winegard knows from her spring experience some of the reasons students — in general and in ASD — tend to be absent. For example, the pandemic created a wave of illness once mitigation measures were eased as well as parental confusion regarding when kids are too sick to go to school. In ASD specifically, a challenge is a lack of transportation: It’s a bus-free district, and working parents may have schedules that conflict with getting their kids to and from school regularly.

Winegard will be continuing her research with Sinno into her senior year. They plan to sort through more data and communicate their findings to Hays and Central Elementary Schools to educate staff and families about how to foster better attendance. Winegard is interested in continuing the work because of how closely it connects with her interest in developmental psychology: “Chronic absenteeism has a lot to do with developmental issues,” she says. “Students who miss a lot of days, it hurts them not just educationally, but also socially.”

Winegard is a student-athlete on the softball team, a tour guide and a member of Peer Health Advocates at Muhlenberg (PHAM). She studied abroad in Stockholm as a junior and also participated in the Community Sustainability in Costa Rica Muhlenberg Integrative Learning Abroad (MILA) course.