Better Learning/Grades

    What area of interest/research question do you wish to explore through a research study design?

• Will a student earn better grades by putting all their focus on listening to what the professor is saying, or by splitting that attention between what the professor says and writing down notes?

    What variables or concepts are you looking to observe and/or manipulate?

• I would like to observe the concept of focus/attention and how beneficial it would be to fully focus on a lecture rather than splitting the attention between listening AND writing.

    What type of design would best suit your research question? (Experimental, Correlational, etc)

• The best design would be correlational to see what kind of effect one variable has on the other.

    What research method would you use to conduct your experiment? (Survey, case study, naturalistic observation, lab experiment, etc.)

• I would survey students who take notes and those that don’t. Once grades are received, I will see if there is any connection between variables.

    If applicable, what would you put as your independent and dependent variables?

• The dependent variable is the grade received by the student and the independent variable is whether or not the student was taking notes or not.

    Give a hypothesis about what you think you might find.

• Splitting focus on writing notes while listening is beneficial and will lead to better grades.

    What might be the benefits and implications of this study? In other words, who would gain from it?

• Students will gain from it because they will see the benefits of taking notes.

 Please reflect on the process of designing this experiment. What were the challenges you faced? Was this more/less difficult than you expected? How?

I think the main challenge is the fact that students may not want to provide their actual grade if it is too low out of embarrassment or fear of being judged. The best solution of course is to ensure anonymity.