Grant (1998) Flashcards
What was the background?
Encoding and recall.
What was the aim?
To investigate whether performance on a short-answer recall test on a multiple-choice test is affected by whether they were silent or loud, mismatching or matching conditions.
What was the research method and the IVs and DVs?
Snowball sampling, lab experiment and independent measures design.
IVs - silent or loud environment.
DVs - short-answer recall test and multiple-choice recall test.
What was the sample?
39, 17 to 56 year old students from USA. 8 members of a psychology lab class as experimenters then they recruited 5 people each.
What was the procedure?
1 experimenter had 1 participant each for each of the four conditions and one other participant. Each participant had headphones with cafeteria noise. Study material on psychoimmunology. 16 multiple-choice questions. Given instructions which state participation is voluntary. Read article one, allowed to highlight and underline. Informed on what was going to happen. All wore headphones. In silent condition – told they wouldn’t hear anything. In loud condition – told they would hear noise but to ignore it. Reading times recorded. Break of two minutes between the end of the study phase and test phase. Short-term answer test given first followed by the multiple-choice. Participants tested in the condition were told if it was to be quiet or noisy. Debriefed concerning purpose of experiment. Lasted 30 minutes. Short answer – 10 questions. Multiple choice – 16 questions.
What were the results?
Matched condition recalled better or more.
What were the conclusions?
Studying and testing in the same environment leads to enhanced performance.
