Hello all, ** Let me say the most important thing first: I will almost certainly be re-writing the source code of Mnemosyne to form two specialized branches. I can almost certainly do the raw coding by myself, but I might need help figuring out how to compile and package the programs for distribution. **
I'm a senior-year undergraduate studying Linguistics and Cognitive Science at Cornell University. Earlier I mentioned that I was planning to do an experiment on students learning Mandarin as a foreign language in which I would test to see what effect studying characters by spaced repetition would have versus studying characters naively. I planned to do this as a very explicit pilot-implementation program: telling the students up-front what the intervention would be, recruiting volunteers, and then splitting them into one group that would employ the program and one group that would not, with all of the participants being evaluated and compensated for their participation. I have now been told that, for my experiment to be considered rigorous enough, I must instead deceive the participants. I must tell all participants that they will employ the experimental studying method, but give one group the functioning software and give the other group a crippled version of the software. The difference would be that in the crippled version, the cards would not be scheduled by the algorithm. Rather, the students would select what to review, and would be told that their self-grading is just to let us know how hard each character is. I would envision implementing it like this: 1. Remove all references to spaced repetition or to feedback-based scheduling from the interface. This would apply to both the "working" program and to the "sabotaged" program to maintain the deception. 2. Rewrite the scheduling algorithm on the "sabotaged" program to ALWAYS schedule items for the very next day when graded 2-5. 3. Divide the cards into small sets. (If they were all in one big set, then the students running the "sabotaged" program would have 100+ cards scheduled per day, always the same cards, and no one would ever stick to that program.) 4. Instruct the participants using the "sabotaged" program to study by selecting which subset of characters they want to review from the "activate categories" menu, then going through every card in that set and self-grading as usual. I don't like this design at all. But that's how I'm being told to do it. The idea is that all of the users will see the same interface and go through the same basic experience, just that one group will be self- scheduled and one group will be computer-scheduled. I think I have the programming ability to re-write the source code to achieve those things- it should be fairly trivial, actually, to do the appropriate sabotage- but actually compiling the program and building an installer (for both Windows and OS X) is beyond my knowledge currently. I may be looking for mentoring on those subjects in the relatively-near future... Best, Bill --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "mnemosyne-proj-users" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/mnemosyne-proj-users?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
