SET UP EXPERIMENT PLAN
Make sure you lay out clearly how your experiment will proceed: exactly what participants will do at each point in the study, how you and/or your RAs will run each participant, etc. It's crucial to plan this all in detail and get everyone on the same page.
What Your Plan Should Include
- Process for recruiting/confirming participants
- How to prepare for and greet a participant
- Participant completes a payment form (needed in order to be paid)
- Participant completes a consent form
- Subject ID Assignment (using the online tool)
- Study procedures (with standard scripts written)
- Debriefing
- Payment
- How to clean up space after each participant
- How to transmit, store, process and analyze data after each participant
Record all these steps in a protocol document that outlines exactly what experimenters should do/say to make the study run smoothly.
Set up physical and electronic spaces
- Create Google Drive or Dropbox folders to organize documents/data
- Create a Google spreadsheet to log each session and keep notes on each participant, in case of any issues
- Make sure your Matlab stimulus presentation files are on the appropriate computers
- Share relevant Google Drive/Dropbox folders with your RAs
- Have documents (consent forms, payment forms, debriefing forms, etc.) all printed out and organized in folders in the testing room
- Put bookmarks to your study's questionnaires on the testing room computer for easy access