John Bargh Priming and LMS quiz

John Bargh is a Professor of Social Psychology at Yale University. His work has been investigating a phenomenon called ‘Priming’ for a number of years. These experiments are of a practical nature and demonstrate changes in peoples behaviour according to a context they have been primed for. The results are of great significance for practising teachers and offer both technological and non-technological methods of achieving a better classroom experience for students and teachers.

In an experiment 34 students were given a ‘scrambled sentence’ test in which simple four-word sentence was scrambled and an additional word added. The students had to reassemble the words back into a sentence leaving the extra word aside.

The students were divided into two groups one group had the additional words added from a list including words like ‘ bold, rude, bother, disturb, intrude, impolitely’ etc. The second group had a word list including words like ‘considerate, appreciate, patient, polite, courteous’ and so on.

After they finished the test they went down a corridor to an office to collect their next test but the doorway was blocked by a member of staff having a protracted discussion with someone in the office. The only way students could get by was by interrupting. Over 60% of the ‘rude’ cohort interrupted less than 20% of the ‘polite’ cohort interrupted at all. Surprising, as it is the results conceal the fact that the majority did not interrupt at all in the 10 minutes set for the experiment.

John Bargh has done many experiments along these lines using word searches, scrambled sentences, missing words, in fact using the same methods most teachers use to reinforce learning. Clearly with the minimum of tweaking this practice can provide an additional layer of usefulness.

At My School – FGS- in Derbyshire, UK we have used Moodle, our LMS to create ‘short Answer’ quizzes. Students are given a short jumbled up sentence that is based on work we would expect them to know about inside the subject area. An additional word is added that comes from a list of desired attributes. The Quiz draws on a ‘Question Bank’ that will eventually have 200+ questions in. Five questions are drawn out at random and offered in random order. The initial result is favourable but the questions have to be really simple, simpler than had initially been realised.

An important consideration is that students should not realise that there are two intentions for the quiz and making it subject specific helps with that.