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Cardinal Scholar is the University Libraries Institutional Repository for archival and scholarly research produced at Ball State University.
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Item Predicting mathematical outcomes: analyzing German Pisa cases(2025-05)This study explores the primary predictors of math performance among German secondary school students, utilizing the 2022 PISA dataset in order to do so. The analysis focuses on three ability-based groups—below average, average, and gifted students—and investigates how factors such as math anxiety, math efficacy, teacher-student relationships, and math persistence influence student performance. The results imply that for below-average students, higher math anxiety and teacher support, along with increased math efficacy, are associated with lower performance. Interestingly, math persistence emerged as the only statistically significant positive predictor for below-average students. For average and gifted students, math anxiety and efficacy show similar negative relationships with performance, with the effects being weaker for higher-performing students. Teacher-student relationships and familiarity with mathematical terms yielded mixed results. The findings suggest that while math anxiety and overconfidence in abilities can hinder performance, perseverance/persistence could offer a modifiable pathway for improving outcomes, in particular for lower-performing students. The study highlights these complex relationships and has a call to action for further research, so that researchers can better understand how specific forms of teacher support and efficacy impact students of varying abilities.Item Child's play: the franchise that always returns, no matter what(2025-05)27The Child’s Play series is a film and television series that has been undervalued in the horror genre in comparison with other slasher franchises in the subgenre. The series has provided a singular, continuous storyline that has been expanded significantly since the first film in 1989. This success and continuation of continuity can be attributed to the series creator, Don Mancini, incorporating and integrating queer culture and themes into the story, while maintaining creative control from Child’s Play 2 (1990) onward. By embracing the series queer identity and tone and not backtracking on story elements that conflicted with the original vision of the series and moving forward, the Child’s Play franchise has outlasted many competitors and creatively has come back from the dead multiple times over the years.Item Optimism and pessimism: the duty and inevitability of the care professions as exhibited by Louisa May Alcott's Work: A story of experience(2025-05)[Lousia May Alcott is a renown author and the subject of much scholarship; however, the purpose of the following paper is to analyze how her publication Work: A Story of Experience interacts with the idea of care labor and the reality of care laborers. Throughout the novel, Alcott utilizes hearth imagery to catalog the mentality of her protagonist, a care laborer named Christie determined to achieve independence of her own accord and secure a legacy of which she can be proud. Though Alcott is traditionally analyzed through a more feminist lens, Christie’s narrative in alignment with the hearth catalog additionally serves as an example for the treatment of the laborers within care professions, as well as the characterizations of the professions themselves. Her example specifically allows for a reader to understand the manner in which boundaryless professions and professions based in care labor affect the mindset of a laborer. Over the course of the paper, optimism as a duty of care laborer will be proven as well as the existence of various forms of optimism and the slow descent of that optimism into a pessimism that is shown to be inevitable, given the conditions faced by the care laborer, demonstrated by Christie. Though this paper focuses its attention on the analysis of Christie as an example of the experiences of care laborers, it draws insight from beyond Alcott scholars, citing academics with focuses on optimism, pessimism, boundarylessness, and various studies on the care professions themselves. This scholarship works together to prove Christie’s shifting mindset, the catalog of hearth imagery, and the relevance of care labor both within and beyond the original literature.]Item (Re)writing the pain: agency and recovery in young adult problem novels(2025-05)While some scholarship exists analyzing Young Adult (YA) problem novels, including texts that focus on self-harm and suicide, published work does not currently bring these texts into conversation with Rudine Sims Bishop’s seminal work “Mirrors, Windows, and Sliding Glass Doors.” This essay analyzes three YA problem novels—It’s Kind of a Funny Story (2007), Girl in Pieces (2016), and All the Bright Places (2015)—to demonstrate how all three texts act as mirrors for the reader, thus allowing readers to see various ways in which characters with suicidal and self-harm thoughts cope with their triggers and desires. By using Bishop as a lens, this essay also articulates the importance of providing problem novel texts to adolescent readers, despite the troubling and triggering content.Item "What if a boyish lover had found his way into the house?" Lesbian masculinity in Carmilla(2025-05)In this essay, I will investigate the ways in which the titular character of the vampire novella Carmilla is masculinized within the text—both by adhering to and going against—Victorian standards of masculinity. I will also view Carmilla’s hybridized, masculine and feminine gender through the lens of Judith Butler’s theory of gender performance. Carmilla’s hybridized performance of gender would have made Victorian readers very uncomfortable due to strict gender roles in the period, and therefore, Carmilla perfectly embodies Butler’s idea that performing one’s gender incorrectly creates change. Finally, I will incorporate lesbian scholarship from the twentieth century into my essay to demonstrate how the stereotyping of masculine women as predators still haunts masculine women today just as it did in the nineteenth century. Like Carmilla, many masculine women today are punished in various ways—including by being pushed out of spaces for women and even sometimes through their deaths—for their “incorrect” performance of gender.
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