Week Five: Ready Set Go

This week marked the end of the preparation phase of my project, and I am feeling genuinely excited about what is ahead. After weeks of refining the research design, consulting with mentors, and navigating the logistics of working within a school environment, everything is coming together.

The highlight of this week was finalizing the list of 30 students who will be participating in my experiment next Thursday. I spent time consulting with Dr. Knox, Mr. Yoon, and Director Forde to confirm who would be taking part in the study. Securing the participants makes the whole project feel much more real and tangible.

As a summary, the test will be conducted during lunch and will involve 9th- and 10th-grade students split into three separate conditions based on phone placement. Each group will be shown a set of information projected on the board, which they will have 10 seconds to memorize. After it disappears, they will have another 10 seconds to process before recreating what they saw on printed paper. This will be repeated three times per group, keeping the total testing time to around five minutes per group. Students will also complete a short survey measuring their typical level of smartphone usage, which will allow me to correlate phone habits with recall performance using a Pearson correlation coefficient.

After finalizing the protocol, getting administrative approval, and reading through a number of papers and journals, I feel confident and prepared heading into testing. Next week’s post will have actual results. Until then!