In our research so far, I haven’t had many surprising or challenging moments. The only time I was a little confused was when I was testing my first person. I asked them to put headphones in and listen to music, and they asked me if there was a specific type of music they should listen to. My partner and I hadn’t really talked about what kind of music we would have our volunteers listen to, so I decided to tell them to pick a song they enjoyed. Every time I gave the test after that, I told people the same thing to keep it consistent. I think it would be interesting to look further into how different types of music affect test taking or try to find out if we get distracted by obnoxious music or even music we know.
I think our project is going well so far. We’re on track, but we should get a few more people to take our survey and our test. We have a lot of different data, but a common theme is that students believe they focus better on tests while listening to music. I think we should branch out more to other ages of students because a lot of our participants have been other freshmen. It could have been interesting to ask about age on the survey to see if age affects how we concentrate with music. We also need to make sure we get the same number of people to participate in taking our test with and without music. Overall, we don’t have much left to do, we just need to get as many people to participate as possible so we can have the most accurate data as possible. I’m not sure we are going to have a very conclusive result, but regardless, it will be interesting to see how our question affects different people on campus.
Good observation! Smart decision to tell everyone after that to do the same thing, or else that could have skewed your data. I hope you do get to branch out to different ages in the next week or so. Try Red Square, or other places where there is a mix of ages. ALSO don’t forget social media!