Chapter specific application exercises will help you think about research design in practice or have you explore a relevant resource.

Exercise 1: Further Adventures With Study Conditions

Revisit Professor Michaels’s efforts to research the link, if any, between study conditions and academic performance. His experiments used two study conditions—group and individual. Study conditions involve a lot more than whether a student is studying alone or with others, though. What other factors might be part of a study condition? Availability of coffee and snacks? Internet access? Identify at least five factors that you would see as part of study conditions and design an experiment or experiments that show how you would test for the influence of at least one of these factors on academic performance.

Exercise 2: An Experiment in Persuasion

Assume that campus surveys over time show a steady decline in the willingness of students to engage in volunteer community service work. Your campus administration and student government are both concerned about this trend and have asked you to research student responses to volunteerism with a view to reversing the trend. As part of a broader research strategy, you decide to focus on the messages that students get about volunteer service. Your working hypothesis is that the appeals used in public service announcements and the like to motivate students to volunteer are not persuasive with the current generation of students. Design an experiment that will test different persuasive appeals about volunteerism with students in order to identify the most effective appeal(s).

Exercise 3: Hybrid or Regular?

In this case, the topic is online education, not vehicles. As online education has developed, three modes of instruction have emerged—100% online with no physical contact among students and instructor (“click”); traditional classroom instruction (“brick”); and hybrid classes in which regular classroom instruction is supplemented with online resources, quizzes, electronic submission of assignments, and discussion sites (“brick and click”).

Research indicating that one of these modes should be preferred over the other two obviously could trigger important policy changes such as budget allocations, technology acquisition, and faculty teaching loads. The issue is complex enough that a series of studies will likely be needed in order to arrive at any definitive findings. Draw up an outline of the experiments that will be needed as the basis for any changes in online education policy at your institution. The Althaus (1997) article referenced below will give you some ideas about experimental design on this topic.

Exercise 4: Assessing the Effect of an Instructional Program 

A Pew Research Center Internet, Science & Tech Project study (Smith, 2014) found that while a majority of Americans were able to correctly answer many questions about the Internet, relatively few were able to correctly answer questions about some basic concepts. For example, only 44% were aware that when a company posts a privacy statement, it does not necessarily mean that the company is keeping the information it collects on users confidential. Just 23% were aware that the Internet and the World Wide Web do not refer to the same thing.

Assume that in response to such data your college has introduced new programs to ensure that all students graduate with a basic knowledge of the Internet. Subsequent surveys of graduating seniors indicate that they have an acceptable level of Internet knowledge, but as we know, surveys do not address causality. In other words, how do we know that the college’s new programs caused the satisfactory outcomes it is seeing? Is it possible that many students would have this level of knowledge without the instructional programs? (College students as a group overall did relatively well on the Pew survey.)

What experiment(s) might you design to help assess whether the seniors’ level of knowledge of the Internet is a function of the college’s instructional program and not of other relevant experiences such as using social media, gaming, or buying and selling on the Internet?

Assume that your dependent variable is knowledge of the Internet, as operationalized by the above Pew survey.

Identify the independent variables that might influence a student’s knowledge of the Internet and design an experiment to help the college decide whether its programs are in fact making a contribution to students’ awareness of the Internet.