Hannah May awarded 2025 Psychology Thesis Award for research on early numeracy predictors
June 9, 2025
Congratulations to Hannah May, who has been awarded the 2025 Psychology Thesis Award for her thesis, "Quantitative and Linguistic Pathways to Early Numeracy: The Importance of Parental Attitudes, Home Experiences, and Early Skills."
Every year, Psychology faculty members are asked to nominate deserving Psychology 4891E students. A department subcommittee reviews nominations to select the winner, who is chosen based on the overall quality of their thesis, including the overall quality of writing and student initiative, as well as conceptualizing an innovative and scholarly research question and design, using appropriate data collection methods and analyses, and framing the study results in the context of relevant theory and research.
May, who will be graduating as part of King’s Spring Convocation with a Bachelor of Arts - Honours Specialization in Psychology and a Major in Criminology, says she is “incredibly honoured’ to receive the award, especially because there were “many other worthy projects” completed by the other students in her class.
May explains that working on her thesis was “an amazing hands-on opportunity” that focused on environmental factors, including parental attitudes and home activities, and early skills in numeracy and literacy domains, to predict math ability in senior kindergarten students. Using the Pathways to Mathematics model as a framework and structural equation modelling for her analysis, she took a broad approach to cross-domain mathematics predictors. Employing this method, she was able to determine that parental attitudes and early skills produced a better model fit, and were better predictors of mathematical ability than home activities.
With support from Dr. Marcie Penner, Associate Professor of Psychology and her thesis adviser, every step of the way, May says she owes much of the success of the project to her guidance and expertise.
Dr. Penner says that what made May's an exceptionally strong candidate for the award was "her level of independence, scope of thesis components, quality of scholarship, originality within the context of an existing body of knowledge, and the quality of her writing."
"Hannah May is a student research of the highest calibre. I am honoured to have had the opportunity to mentor her and am excited to see what she does in her graduate work and beyond," Dr. Penner adds.
“Having the ability to choose and develop my own project was a highlight of my university career, as it allowed me to develop relationships across campus. Receiving this award motivates me to continue engaging in research and to continue on the academic path that I’m on,” says May.