Dear Diary,
on Sunday, we drove to Leer and parked the car there. (The train station in Leer is sketchy as fuck…). Then we took the train to Heidelberg. Which is quite far away. From the station in Heidelberg, we walked for 20 minutes to our hotel in the Altstadt. We checked in at around 11 pm.
It was my supervisor and our research assistant and student SM. The conference started the next morning and the first session was at 8:40. I was the last speaker in that session and also had to chair it. Which meant I had to be there at 8:30. Which was quite painful for me.
My talk went well. And the other talks in the session were also really good. It was a shame that almost no-one saw our talks. It was kind of stupid of the organizers to start the conference so early. Most people don’t live far enough away to already arrive the night before and traveled on Monday morning. So a lot of people skipped the first (two) session(s) and arrive later. At the very first talk in my session, the audience was basically empty: it was the other speakers and two more people. (The guy took it well and said, “let me take a picture of the audience to show to my mum how relevant my work is.” :D ). By the time I was up there were about 15 or maybe 20 people.
The advantage was that I was “done”. I didn’t need to worry about my presentation anymore and could just sit in on all the talks and browse the program. Which was surprisingly extensive. There were four sessions with talks each day. Each session had four talks and at each moment, there were 12 parallel sessions. That about 190 possible talks a day (20 minutes each). There was a keynote speaker at 12 each day and a one-hour lunch break followed by a one-hour poster session. Each day started at 8:40 am and the last talk ended at 6:20 pm. That is to say: it was pretty intense.
I didn’t really come across anything that was directly and extremely relevant to my own work. But I did come across a lot of interesting ideas and got to talk to a bunch of people that provided helpful comments and that I could provide some inspiration to as well. It was pretty great.
One of the things that I took away from the conference is that I might want to look into the literature of “educational games”. It’s a whole field that I have not really thought about at all. But they do a lot of research on how to make the games more enjoyable for people to play and maximize what people learn from those games (and also how to track and quantify learning). It’s kind of weird that I never really thought about this before but that’s a good way to think about our learning software and to possibly extend it in the future.
The other thing is that I started planning another project that should be very easy and straightforward but will be interesting. In the current, big project, we estimate how well people can learn facts and get their grades. There is a small relationship between those two measures which is great. Especially because grades are not correlated at all with IQ (in the same sample). We also measured motivation. That is, a specific questionnaire that assessed “study-related motivation”. Some of those sub-scales are also related to grades (as expected). But the motivation scores are not at all related to how well someone learns facts.
Which makes a lot of sense: there’s no reason to assume that someone is better at some random task in the laboratory just because they are motivated to get high grades and have the self-discipline to get them.
I do think there’s an influence of motivation on fact-learning, though. Some people are just more motivated than others. And some people are just better than others. But it’s difficult to tease the two apart: if someone gets high scores, we don’t know to which extent that is because they are very good or because they are highly motivated.
Therefore, I’ve been thinking about ways to experimentally manipulate motivation in the learning task. There are several ways to do it. The most obvious is to pay participants based on their performance: you have 20 minutes to study these words. You get 50 cents for each correct answer on the test. We could compare that group with a group that gets a base rate: everyone gets paid the same. (And maybe we can even add a third group that does it for “study credit” – no payment at all.)
I think that’s the simplest and most straightforward way. Alternatively, you can also use “social comparison” to motivate people. That is, you can either tell them “you’re doing better/worse than the 10 people before you”, for example. Although that is a bit more tricky because the effect of such a manipulation depends a lot on the exact situation and also the person. (Some people might get worse if you tell them they’re doing very well because they have no reason to try harder. Others might either give up if they are told they are doing poorly or they might work extra hard to try and keep up with “the others”. So it’s less predictable.)
I’ll be very busy with a bunch of other things in the next two weeks. But I’ll talk to my research assistant and ask her to look into the literature. There are a bunch of studies that manipulate motivation during learning. I’ll ask her to compile a small overview of the techniques usually used. I think paying people for their performance is the best way to do it but maybe a literature search will reveal a better idea of reasons why my idea is a bad idea.
It might also be tricky to get this through the Ethics Committee because variable pay-offs are not as easy. I think it should be possible (and otherwise, I know how to do it without the Ethics Committee at Psychology but I’d prefer to do it the official way….)
Anyways – very productive and stimulating conference. Heidelberg is also very pretty. :)
Super Public Diary 