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Advanced Higher Biology Investigation (sort of psychology related too)

In my AH bio class our teacher has left us to come up with ideas over the holidays, so I've been brainstorming a bit about what I could do for my investigation.

I was thinking of doing a behavioural one, like on investigating memory span or learning types or something.

I have some ideas, like getting people to try and memorise random word pairs by different methods (e.g. telling one group to read the pairs silently, another to read them out loud, getting them to listen to the pairs on a recorded tape, etc.) and seeing how many word pairs are remembered, to investigate which learning method is 'best'.

Anyway, I was just wondering if anyone who has already done AH bio or has studied psychology at some point could give me some ideas on what I could do. I know it's a little vague, but if anyone could describe a psychology test that they have done that has produced results it would be very helpful. :yep: :biggrin: Thanks in advance.
Reply 1
NoGreywolf
In my AH bio class our teacher has left us to come up with ideas over the holidays, so I've been brainstorming a bit about what I could do for my investigation.

I was thinking of doing a behavioural one, like on investigating memory span or learning types or something.

I have some ideas, like getting people to try and memorise random word pairs by different methods (e.g. telling one group to read the pairs silently, another to read them out loud, getting them to listen to the pairs on a recorded tape, etc.) and seeing how many word pairs are remembered, to investigate which learning method is 'best'.

Anyway, I was just wondering if anyone who has already done AH bio or has studied psychology at some point could give me some ideas on what I could do. I know it's a little vague, but if anyone could describe a psychology test that they have done that has produced results it would be very helpful. :yep: :biggrin: Thanks in advance.

What you've got is already a good start, if you wanted other ideas then I don't know if you did human bio but in unit 3 of human bio you look at memory testing. An example of these tests is a list of 30 random objects is read out and then the subjects have to try and remember as many as possible (if you look at the pattern of words remembered the first words and last words are more likely to be remembered), another example is Kim's game (the game with objects under a blanket and one is removed). You could also look at things how the time of day, smells or energy drinks/foods effect memory.


If you want to continue your idea you need to find a reasonable number of volunteers and decide whether you will have the same volunteers trying to remember random pairs in the different ways and how you are going to generate your random pairs so when different selections are used they are fair comparisons. You will probably need about 20 volunteers minimum (I'm sure this was a number reccommended to us when we did our bio investigations).


I had friends who did a pyschology investigation where they investigated the effect of rewards on memory - so in return for remembering the list of words they got a sweet (interesting the names of sweets were the better remembered words!) - though I don't know how sucessful the investigation was.
Reply 2
TheRabbit
What you've got is already a good start, if you wanted other ideas then I don't know if you did human bio but in unit 3 of human bio you look at memory testing. An example of these tests is a list of 30 random objects is read out and then the subjects have to try and remember as many as possible (if you look at the pattern of words remembered the first words and last words are more likely to be remembered), another example is Kim's game (the game with objects under a blanket and one is removed). You could also look at things how the time of day, smells or energy drinks/foods effect memory.


Thanks so much for the ideas. :biggrin: I did normal higher biology but some of my friends did human so I'll ask to borrow their unit 3 notes.

TheRabbit
If you want to continue your idea you need to find a reasonable number of volunteers and decide whether you will have the same volunteers trying to remember random pairs in the different ways and how you are going to generate your random pairs so when different selections are used they are fair comparisons. You will probably need about 20 volunteers minimum (I'm sure this was a number reccommended to us when we did our bio investigations).


I think I should be able to get 20 volunteers, so that's no problem. Hmm, do you think there is any way that I could set up a 'control group' in the experiment? Like a group where I don't give them any instructions on how to remember the word pairs?

TheRabbit
I had friends who did a pyschology investigation where they investigated the effect of rewards on memory - so in return for remembering the list of words they got a sweet (interesting the names of sweets were the better remembered words!) - though I don't know how sucessful the investigation was.


That's pretty interesting. A few years ago I volunteered to take part in someone's higher psychology experiment where I had to list as many kitchen items as I could in a timed period. I wasn't told until afterwards, but the person testing me was actually trying to see if there was an increase in the number of items I could list if I was praised. Turns out the praise made me remember more things. :p: So I might look into how praise/rewarding affects memory.
Reply 3
NoGreywolf
Thanks so much for the ideas. :biggrin: I did normal higher biology but some of my friends did human so I'll ask to borrow their unit 3 notes.

I think I should be able to get 20 volunteers, so that's no problem. Hmm, do you think there is any way that I could set up a 'control group' in the experiment? Like a group where I don't give them any instructions on how to remember the word pairs?

You couldn't really have what you are describing as a control group since as I understand it you are planning on letting the groups only hear or read the pairs (not both), though you could have a group that uses all the methods as well as groups using more than one.

The major problem with this investigation is that it depends on the person what learning technique is best, for this reason you will need as many volunteers as possible as otherwise this could seriously skew your results (since i guess you are trying to find what learning technique the most people find best in this situation).
Reply 4
TheRabbit
The major problem with this investigation is that it depends on the person what learning technique is best, for this reason you will need as many volunteers as possible as otherwise this could seriously skew your results (since i guess you are trying to find what learning technique the most people find best in this situation).


Do you think I will still get some usable results despite the different learning preferences between my volunteers? If it's going to be too difficult to do (even with more volunteers), I might try doing a different kind of behavioural experiment. Also, does it matter how many girls/boys I have in my volunteers or do they have to be near enough 50/50? :confused:
Reply 5
NoGreywolf
Do you think I will still get some usable results despite the different learning preferences between my volunteers? If it's going to be too difficult to do (even with more volunteers), I might try doing a different kind of behavioural experiment. Also, does it matter how many girls/boys I have in my volunteers or do they have to be near enough 50/50? :confused:

For you results to be valid you need a large number of volunteers to try and stop this being a problem, though since we have no idea of what statistics of people have different learning preferences and whether this can change in different situations it could get a bit complicated.

You could do a series of different activities where you test volunteers learning preferences and then compare learning preferences of the same volunteer in different activities as well as seeing which learning preferences are most popular, this would get round the problem. (Volunteers are assigned a number so the results are anonymous)

Since Gender could affect this you need to decide to use only girls/boys or equal numbers of both.

There are plenty other areas of learning, memory and other behaviors that can be investigated.

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