Interesting experiment! Let me know if you need help, including with packaging.
Peter On Thursday 06 November 2008 22:08:53 Bill Price (formerly Notyourbroom) wrote: > 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 > -- ------------------------------------------------ Peter Bienstman Ghent University, Dept. of Information Technology Sint-Pietersnieuwstraat 41, B-9000 Gent, Belgium tel: +32 9 264 34 46, fax: +32 9 264 35 93 WWW: http://photonics.intec.UGent.be email: [EMAIL PROTECTED] ------------------------------------------------ --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ 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 -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
