Shapesplosion is an on-line game in which a person is expected to place specifically shaped pegs into the appropriate holes within a short time period. In this project, students are asked to use the Shapesplosion game to design an experiment and collect data. This game is specifically designed so that students have the opportunity to develop and test their own unique research question.

You can leave all the variables blank when you are simply trying out the game, however, if you want to find your score is the database of results, you will need to select the Participant Info box.

The following link allows you to play to the Shapesplosion Game.

In the following activites, students will have the opportunity to design and analyze an experiment. They will:

• Formulate a hypothesis test about the number of items sujbect can remember
• Determine how to collect data that best addresses their research question.
• Collect data
• Check model assumptions
• Analyze the data
• Draw conclusions within the context of their study

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Instructors Notes for Research Project:

Prerequisites: This lab can easily be done as a 2-sample t-test or a paired t-test using one explanatory variable. If students are planning to conduct a multifactor experiment, they should read and answer questions from Chapter 4: Design of Experiments. This chapter is freely available for class testing. More complex designs, such as repeated measure designs, are discussed in Chapter 5.

Research Project Materials:

Project Goals:

1) Experience statistics as it is practiced by researchers in psychology:

2) Develop a systematic model for development of an experimental design:

Paper Review: I have found that some students are initially frustrated or intimidated when they are asked to read a research paper outside of their major. In my experience, providing more time to read the paper has not been helpful. It may, however, be appropriate to:

• clarify that the paper review questions are worth only a small amount of the overall grade
• allow students to complete the assignment in groups
• allow students to turn in a revised version of their paper review questions after they are discussed in class.

Class Discussion: I suggest spending at least part of three separate class periods to discuss the Stroop (1935) paper and develop a class project or several group projects.  It is helpful to initially identify that your goal as a professor is not to be able to answer all of their questions about current research in cognitive psychology, but to teach them a process in which they can find their own answers.

You may want to consider additional discussion topics:

• You can instruct the students to go to the library and read a chapter on attention, memory, or reaction time from any introductory psychology book. Ask them to identify some of the factors that could influence reaction time.
• You may want to discuss the Woodworth Wells Color Sheet before the students read the paper by Stroop.
• If you want students to find their own research papers on reaction time tests, http://www.apa.org/psycinfo/ is a good psychology resource.

Step 1: Spend at least 20 minutes discussing the paper review questions. Students may not feel qualified to design a psychology study, but they often can suggest appropriate modifications to a given study. Start students thinking about their own primary research questions and ask them:

• How would you design a test to answer these questions?
• Which factors and what levels could be used?
• Which questions relate to main effects and which relate to interaction effects? 
• How can you design an experiment that is general enough to be of scientific interest, but specific enough that it can be conducted within a lab in a few weeks time?

Step 3: After students have submitted their experimental ideas, the class can vote on one experiment to conduct as an entire class. This allows you to test more factors and levels with replicates in less time. However, each group of students could just as easily design and analyze their own experiments.

It is beneficial to talk about scale-attenuation effects (i.e. floor or ceiling effects) before students finalize their design.  If the subjects rarely finish before the timer expires (i.e. the dependant variable is almost always at the highest time level), no differences will be seen between the conditions (even if one truly exists). While students may not consider it as fun as the other options, "no time limit" provides the most straightforward response variable to analyze.

One related topic not discussed in the listed research papers is how stress can impact reaction time. The students can calculate the average time per piece and determine if a time limitation of "short", "medium", "long", or "no time limit" impacts there average time per piece.

Final Paper or Poster Discussion: During the in-class review day, spend some time discussing how the process details (which are rarely discussed in textbooks and are often only given cursory comments in research papers) can significantly impact the analyses and conclusions of the data. My students are typically surprised by:

Stat2labs was developed with partial support provided by the Transforming Undergraduate Education in Science (TUES).program at the National Science Foundation under DUE 0510392 and DUE #1043814