Monday, February 13, 2017

Forgetfulness Project Post 1

          My project is about how we forget and why we forget. This is my 20% time project that I will be working on for the semester. 20% time project is basically a project that uses 20% of class time to pursue a topic that you are interested in. When I was researching topics to do my 20% time project, I thought that researching about forgetfulness would be interesting to make an experiment on and to figure out how it works, since much about the human brain is a mystery. The essential question that I have asked about my topic is, "How does forgetting work and why do people forget certain things?" This question will guide me on my experiment and research to finding the essential knowledge needed to carry out this task.

Image result for forgetting
https://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/forgetting.png
       
          My goals are to conduct an experiment involving forgetfulness and retention of memory. I haven't figured out what experiment specifically to do, but that is also one of my goals for this week. Another one of my goals is to increase my understanding of how forgetting works and to share it out through this blog, and to increase awareness for the 20% time projects since I think that it is a chance for students to express what they want to learn.
          How I will measure progress and achievement is to possibly see a noticeable difference between my control and manipulated variables. The difference I hope to see would obviously depend on the experiment I decide to do, but it would be to see the difference on how much one person has retained some piece of information versus the other person.
          So far, my plan moving forward is to make an experiment and hopefully gain all the materials and start it by this week. Next week I want to be able to record and compile the data that I have collected and I will keep doing this until the experiment is over. Then I will analyze the data and see if I met my goal of seeing a difference of the retention of the piece of information.

3 comments:

  1. This is such an interesting and great concept. As a forgetful person, I'd like to know why I'm like an old grandma. A suggestion is that you could test students using a matching memory game. What is your requirements for test subjects?
    -Jolyn Tran

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  2. Well... I wish you luck for finding out an experiment. Is this going to be testing the kind of short term memory or will you be working over the long term?
    The topic is really interesting ( I hate when I forget things) and hopefully you will be able to raise awareness.

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  3. This is really interesting as I myself have forgotten many things before, and am interested to see you results. However, are you test subjects going to have certain requirements like age, or other characteristics?

    --Rishub Tamirisa

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