Make a program that administrates a test that is to be used in a research experiment in psychology.

The research study will look at how people respond to feedback that they are doing good or doing bad on a task. More specifically, the study looks at, how important people think it is to perform well, depending on well they think they are doing.

To study this, the following experiment is developed. The participants do a proof-reading test and are then told that they are doing good or are doing bad. This has nothing to do with how they are actually doing. They then answer a number of questions, most importantly, how well they want to do on this test. The participants do the test four times.

I want you to create the following program.

1. The program administers the test.
2. The program tells the participant a score that depends on the condition, more about that below. The program also tells the participant that the average score on this test is 70 on a scale from 1-100.
3. The program then asks the participant to answer a number of questions.
4. Repeat steps 2-4 three more times.

The test

The participant sees two pieces of text on the screen. If the two text pieces are identical the participant presses one button, if there is the slightest difference between the two, however, the participant pushes another button. What the two buttons are I leave up to you. When the participant has decided if the two text pieces are identical or not, the program moves on to the next pair of text. The score the person would get on this test would be how many pairs he/she got right minus the pairs he/she got wrong. This is irrelevant, however, a true score has not to be recorded. The score the person gets is a predetermined score. The participant is given 3 minutes to complete the test.

The pairs of text is in the file, textpairs.doc. The header says if the page belongs to test number I, II, III or IV

The scores

When the participant enters the program, I want it to randomly place the participant in one of four groups or conditions. The participant never knows anything about this. The conditions determine what score the person gets.

	Test 1	Test 2	Test 3	Test 4
Condition 1	81	Random 76-84	Random 76-84	Random 76-84
Condition 2	81	Random 54-64	Random 54-64	Random 54-64
Condition 3	59	Random 76-84	Random 76-84	Random 76-84
Condition 4	59	Random 54-64	Random 54-64	Random 54-64

The questions

The questions are in the file, experimentquestions.doc.

Have the program ask the participant the questions and give the alternatives. The program will ask the participant the same set of questions after every test. I want the program to record everything and put it in an Excel spreadsheet. The information that I want on that spreadsheet is:

1. A participant number
2. The condition the participant was assigned to.
3. The scores the participant got.
4. The answer on every answer, code the answers so it you can see after which test the answer was given.

The questions in the file are designed so people can answer them on paper. Feel free to design how participants answer the question as you see most fit. This goes for the whole program. It is important that it is clear for the participant understands how to answer the questions.

Bonus features:

Make an introduction with instructions, and a short training example

Make the test randomly assign participants to conditions in iterations of 20. When 20 people have completed the experiment, there will be 5 people in every condition.

Make the test grade itself, and record the true scores in the Excel sheet.

For the study to be ethically approved, the participants must be able to end the experiment at any time. Add a feature that makes it possible to exit the program any time. Give instructions how to do this (avoid just pressing ‘Esc’, we don’t want participants to exit by mistake).

If you have any questions about what the program should do, email bs578986@albany.edu.

Benny Salo, graduate student in Industrial and Organizational Psychology at State University of New York at Albany.