Final Project Presentation Schedule (and some advice/guidelines)

Guidelines & Advice
Presentations should be NO MORE than 20 minutes long. You will be docked 10 percent of your presentation grade for every minute (or fraction) you go over the time limit! So, I will cut you off at the 25-minute mark to keep things moving and save time for others. Strategy Tip: Present the designs in ANY order you want = start with the one you need the most help with! IMPORTANT: Final presentation grades include TWO parts: The presentation grade = 13 pts Participation in others’ presentations = 5 pts
EXAMPLE
Research Question: What are the effects (if any) of room-color on algebra performance? Three Tiered Research Plan Non-Experiment: Chi-square examination of grades vs. room color at 10 different schools. Find 10 different local colleges/universities. See what all the algebra classroom colors are. Count the number of each final grade-type. Perform a chi-square test to find any differences in proportion of grades across the classroom colors. Quasi-Experiment: Compare different grade-levels across different room colors at 10 different schools. See how students do in the different colored classrooms according to if they are freshmen, sophomores, juniors, or seniors. This would be a 3x4 between subjects ANOVA. Dependent variable will be final grade. Experiment: Randomly assign 50 students to one of three different room colors for algebra class. I am actually stuck here, because I don’t know if I should use the same three boring colors from the other two designs, or, use three new colors.
POSSIBLE CLASS RESPONSES
Non-Experiment: Do you need to count the number of letter grades? Isn’t that a weaker type of data than if you got the class averages? Then you could do ANOVA instead of chi-square. It doesn’t seem like the classroom colors are much different. Do you think that could be a limitation? Why didn’t you go with a correlation between color and grade instead? Quasi-Experiment: What if you do not get enough students in each grade level? What would you predict the outcome to be? Experiment: If you use the same three colors, that would help with external validity, right? But he could also use new colors to see if more extreme colors give better results than the traditional boring colors. So we might learn something new.