Step 1 // Deciding on our trial question

Brainstorming!

To begin our teacher put up an assignment on Google Classroom for our ideas for the START competition. We had a week to submit our ideas. There were a lot of good ideas but we narrowed it down to around 15 ideas, then our teacher made a Google Slide presentation with all of the options so that we could look at all of them and discuss them.

Ideas we had!

We had some ideas involving relaxing or going for walks before a test. We also had several ideas on using different coloured paper and pens during a test. There were two ideas on exercise before work/test. We also had one as to whether online or paper was better for homework and if chewing the same type of gum while studying for a test and doing the test improved your score.

Deciding!

Then we took a vote as a class on our favorite trial question. Initially, we had decided on ‘Does chewing the same flavour gum while studying for and completing a test help you remember the things you have studied?’ It was a good idea but there was too many things going against it - It is against school rules to chew gum in school, and the other flaw was some people in our school have braces, and therefore could not take part, and since we had to adhere to the principle of ‘randomisation,’ we couldn’t simply put all of the children with braces in the control group, so we decided to have a second vote, and this time replaced ‘chewing gum’ with ‘mints’ in that particular research question.

Deciding 2.0!

So we had another vote. We took out our Plickers [plickers are these pieces of paper with codes on them, we use them to answer multiple choice questions, therefore they are very handy for voting!] and the teacher then would scan our Plickers. The Plickers would then reveal the answer we thought was the best. We did a few rounds of this and in the end we picked "Would listening to the same music while studying for a test and completing it improve your score". After a long series of voting and debating, we all came to the conclusion that we were going to based our research on this, as we all agreed that it was the best question, and it turned out great! In the end, we were all happy with the question that we had picked!

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