2 Students Get Grants for Projects : Scholars: San Marino teen-ager receives $1,800 for a Jane Austen study. Altadena man is awarded $2,200 to test a theory on inductive reasoning.

Two students from the San Gabriel Valley are among 136 students nationwide selected by the National Endowment for the Humanities for Younger Scholars to conduct independent research and do writing projects this summer.

Amy R. Haley of San Marino, a student at Westridge School in Pasadena, will receive a $1,800 grant for her project, “At Home, Quiet and Confined: Relationships Among Women in the Novels of Jane Austen.”

Jason C. Van Boom of Altadena, a student at Thomas Aquinas College in Ventura County, will receive a $2,200 grant for his project “Karl Popper and the Testing of Scientific Hypotheses.”

Haley said most studies look at the relationships between men and women, “but the women are the ones who are always together giving each other love and emotional support to go through with their small lives.”

The 16-year-old high school junior said she is especially interested in how Austen’s characters overcame their circumstances, which “seemed so confined and constricted, they couldn’t do much outside their lives and social circles.”

Van Boom is a sophomore at the college, which has a Great Books program in which students learn subjects by reading original source material such as Plato for philosophy and Euclid for geometry.

The 21-year-old student says he will test Popper’s theory of science investigation, which denies induction, by looking at three classical science experiments done by William Harvey, Antoine Lavoisier and Blaise Pascal.

“Induction is an integral part of the scientific method,” Van Boom says, “but how do you go from saying that these 10 ravens are black, therefore all ravens are black?”