We were asked to do something similar in a recent Scientific Teaching workshop, but copying a line of text a letter at a time instead of reciting the alphabet, which I think overcomes one of Henry's concerns.
I share his other concern though: if I ignore my e-mail for too long then I'm not doing my job. An exercise like this can be valuable for getting across the perils of multi-tasking, though, without telling people how to manage their time. We all make compromises, but it's better to make them consciously. Cheers Ben On 02/10/17 09:37, Leighton Pritchard wrote: > >> On 2 Oct 2017, at 01:39, Henry Neeman <[email protected] >> <mailto:[email protected]>> wrote: >> >> Not wanting to be a downer, but .... >> >> I'm inclined to agree with David Wees, who >> left the following comment on that page: >> >> "Is this a separate effect or is this >> explainable with the way the memory of >> A, B, C, ... and 1, 2, 3, ... are arranged >> in memory? >> >> I know many people who need to recite the >> entire alphabet, sometimes with a little >> song, in order to remember that N goes after >> M. And my five year old son still needs to >> recite the entire list of counting numbers to >> recall that 15 is after 14. >> >> So does this experiment measure the cost of >> switching tasks or is it measuring something >> else?" > > Maybe one way to test that would be to have the students run backwards > through the alphabet, and count down from 26, then combine the > activities, and see if the effect persists? > > Or, to eliminate memory effects in either direction, have them draw - > say - 10 squares on one piece of paper, and 10 triangles on another, > then attempt to alternate between squares and triangles (on different > pieces of paper) as the combined task? This should be more ‘obviously’ > slower as there is physical movement between the paper, so it would be > harder to distinguish between the mental switching and physical > switching cost, I suppose. Not that physical switching is entirely > irrelevant for distraction, mind. > > L. > > -- > Leighton Pritchard > [email protected] <mailto:[email protected]> > gpg/pgp:0xDECACFFC > > > _______________________________________________ Discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.software-carpentry.org/listinfo/discuss
