Every end is a new beginning

As I officially have met the end of my time at UNH this summer I want to extend my gratitude to Andrew Kun and the Project 54 team for their support and guidance this summer. I would also like to thank Steve Hale and Brad Kinsley for all of the work they put into making this wonderful opportunity for teachers possible. Finally, I would like to thank the teachers who participated in the RETE program for not only being willing participants in my experiments, but for sharing their experiences with me as well as their passion for teaching.

I am very excited to head back into the classroom and not only share my research, but implement lessons I have created this summer! Below you will find my final poster of my research project as well as a short video explaining my project. I will be continuing to update the blog as I implement lessons in the classroom. Please continue to check out my blog throughout the school year!

Poster (1)

Week 6 - DATA

Dilbert.com

This week I continued to work with the data I had collected from the eye trackers during my experiments.  It was a process, but I think I have some graphs that clearly show what I was seeing in the data.

In the graph above you see the Mean Pupil Diameter Change (with standard error)  for each of the participants when they are thinking and when they are at rest.  The odd numbers are when the participant was thinking, the even numbers are when the participant was at rest.

Here you see all the data shown above, but I have rearranged it so you can see the time when participants are thinking and at rest more clearly.

The average pupil diameter of each of the participants when they were thinking/at rest minus the overall average pupil diameter.

It was then suggested it might be neat to also show the pupil diameter change over a matter of seconds (rather than finding the averages between each word).  I spent a lot of time trying to do this, however it proved very difficult with the noise in the data (I had only removed the zeros for blinking and not tracking).

Here I found the average pupil diameter for each second in a series.  The blue vertical line indicates a letter was said, a green vertical line indicates subject 1 said a word, and an orange vertical line indicates subject 2 said a word.  As you can see it was difficult to see a consistent increase and decrease as I had hypothesized.

Here I took the total average pupil size for each second minus the total average for each subject.  I did this because the two subjects had different pupil sizes which made it difficult to compare the two.

Here is the same sequence as you see in the two previous graphs, this is the raw data.  In some cases you can see a small increase/decrease when they are thinking/at rest.

This week we also met as a RETE group to share some of the thing we have been doing with our projects as well as some of our curriculum ideas.  These meetings whether at lunch or in formal situation, as we had this week, have proven to be inspirational.  It has certainly been an honor to work with such dedicated and passionate group of teachers this summer.