Sunday, September 11, 2016

Week 2: 9/6/2016 - 9/13/2016

For me, week 2 involved finishing up some preparation work as well as beginning some research for our project. I completed the last of the required materials that needed submitted, which included our acceptance letter and a few other documents. I also worked through two of the CITI Program's short behavioral research courses. I wasn't sure what to expect but it provided me some valuable information that gave me an idea of what working with a group of people to gather data is going to be like and some basic ethical practices, as I have never been involved in an official research project outside of the classroom. I also modified our website to include this year's information as well as completely updated the design. I added a page for this blog that includes a live RSS feed widget so that all of our information here can be viewed there as well. We plan on also utilizing our website to post some experiments and detailed information about research in order to display our progress as we move forward with our project.

Our research began this week with some preliminary review on past work with eye-tracking studies. Jenna presented a paper on an eye-tracking study that involved differences between C++ and Python in novices vs. non-novices. While I found the results interesting the research paper gave me an idea for the work we might be conducting with our own project. This week we also reviewed another paper on eye-tracking, this time the topic was on where an eye needs to focus in order to maximize comprehension while reading; specifically which linguistic features are most valuable for full understanding for a reader. I will be putting together a presentation for the group this week on that paper. There were some specific methods/considerations discussed in this paper that I look forward to bringing up with the team and thinking about whether this is something that we may able to apply in our own studies.

I look forward to keeping up with this blog, not only to exhibit my progress as we work through this project but also to keep myself organized. This will be a helpful source to look back upon as the project finishes up.

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