Question: Do you have a set of data for learning curve? We do the finger maze activity with students but wondered if you have some other experiment that you carry out to show learning ? We could incorporate this into lesson too!

anon answered on 20 Jun 2018:

I’ve had a look into this and seems the finger maze activity is a great experiment to demonstrate learning to students – I think if you find that this works in your classrooms then it is good to stick with that! In terms of other experiments that show learning, you could adapt the finger maze set up to any kind of set up that requires trial and improvement – for example, throwing a ball into a target hole, in this experiment you could measure errors and show that errors reduce with more tries.

A common way of measuring learning in research is to set up a pre-test > training/exposure > post-test experiment. This could be carried out in a lesson by firstly measuring ability on a task, giving the students time to practise the task and then testing performance again to show improvement from baseline. For example, you could measure their ability on a computer game such as Tetris, give them 15 minutes to practise, then measure ability again at the end. They could then plot the difference between their initial test and their ability after the “learning” period.

There are also a range of simple experiments from psychology research that show how we process information and how memory works that students could take part in in the classroom. This is based on a similar concept to the finger maze test, by getting the students to take part in an experiment and looking at what happens and why. This website here has some examples: https://classroom.synonym.com/ideas-high-school-psychology-experiments-7963453.html

Hope that’s helpful!