04/08/2020
We had our first psychology club meeting. We decided on everyone’s roles and responsibilities. I was assigned the role of Head of Design and Website Management. We had also planned out what progress we would make with the club through the year. We had decided to create small factoids that would go up on the instagram page, articles that would go up on the website, a possible collaboration with another school in Bangalore, and conducting experiments on school students.
11/08/2020
We started planning on what our first experiment should be about. We had a couple options but we decided on conducting the yellow paper experiment. We decided to put our participants’ academic skills in the spotlight and see if it could possibly be altered or swayed through the use of colour. We decided to have the experiment on October 13, a Tuesday, so that we could conduct it in the CAS period where most of our participants would be available.
18/08/2020
We just discussed what type of content we wanted to put out. I also redesigned the website a little to accommodate a “contact” section. We prepared the necessary things in order to conduct the experiment such as preparing the questions, getting the answers, and printing them on an equal number of yellow and white sheets of paper. We also started making the google form to collect the participants.
01/09/2020
I started working on an article titled “Why do humans enjoy fear?” that featured in both the Casual Observer as well as our club site. It talks about how fear, something that is traumatic or horrifying, is enjoyable to some people. I was around halfway through the article by this time. Parallely, another article was in the works. This was titled “Introduction to Psychology” and gave readers a brief introduction to the subject and what the club is about. I edited some aspects of the website in order to make the featured post more prominent and the website looked more organized and colorful compared to its prior versions — this was to enhance the viewer experience.
22/09/2020
We were discussing how to organize our time better and make this club more efficient that it was. We came up with new ideas such as comic strips (like a web-comic that would go up on our instagram and website) so that we could engage the younger audience a bit more. We were able to talk about whether or not we wanted student contributions and input from the greater audience, so that we could create content that they would enjoy more.
29/09/2020
We published our first article titled “Introduction to Psychology”, written by Neel Nair. Here we talked about the different aspects of psychology and its uses in our daily lives. We also discussed the purpose of the club and what we planned on doing in the future. I was able to publish it on the website.
13/10/2020
We conducted our first psychology experiment —The yellow paper experiment! Here, we hypothesized that students perform better on a math test printed on yellow paper compared to a math test printed on a white paper. The results collected from our experiment supported this hypothesis! Through this experience, we learnt how to properly conduct an experiment and what mistakes we made. I understood how people’s minds worked.
03/11/2020
We planned on what we were going to do after the winter holiday. We planned 2 more experiments to conduct after the holidays. These included the list experiment (where I created the debrief and helped conduct the experiment) as well as the conformity test (where I created the introduction and helped conduct the experiment).
08/12/2020
I created the student contribution form and uploaded it to the shared drive so that students could enter their names, grades and google drive link so that they could share their articles/contributions. We did one final recap before going off to the holidays. We discussed the probable work for the coming year and how we would tackle them along the way. We had decided that we would create as much content as possible until March 2021, as after that, we had our SA2 coming up.
19/01/2021
We commenced plans for the teacher interviews. We first approached Sid Sir to see if he would be interested in participating, and he did not hesitate to say yes! We soon began to plan what we would do during the interview session and how we would carry out the process. We also officially began publishing the web-comic series.
26/01/2021
We published an article on our website titled “Which One Do You Look Through?”. This was about perspectives and the different lenses of psychology through which we could analyse a behaviour. The website was updated and the article was put up. We began discussing when we would hand over the club to the next generation, and how we thought the team should grow. I was shifted from Head of Design and Website Management, to the Head of Communications, where I took care of collecting participants for experiments and collected student contributions. I also recommended the Head of Social Media to post on our instagram asking polls and questions in order to engage our audience.
02/02/2021
As head of communications, my first task was to collect participants for our second experiment, we hypothesized that students asked to visualize a set of words perform better on a recall task compared to students looking into the pronunciation of the set of words. Our hypothesis was proven to be true after carrying out the experiment. I learnt how to communicate better and interact with my team members, and I also understood what my responsibilities were so as to do justice to the club.
09/02/2021
This was our final meeting before conducting the experiment, so we just discussed how to carry it out, what participants would show up, how many, how to brief them beforehand, etc. We decided our roles during the experiment. I would be briefing the participants on how to behave during the experiment and a short introduction on what the experiment was about. After this was done, we discussed our third experiment.
23/02/2021
We conducted our second experiment, where we hypothesized that students asked to visualize a set of words perform better on a recall task compared to students looking into the pronunciation of the set of words. The results collected from the experiment supported the hypothesis. The experiment was fun and interesting and I was able to use the information I gained through the experiment and apply it to my psychology class.
30/2/2021
We conducted the third experiment, which was about group conformity. We hypothesized that students would agree with their peers (who were told to give the wrong answer) just to go along with the group. The results showed that all the students would agree with the biased students, which agree to our hypothesis. Through this experiment, I understood the importance of taking my own stance and standing up for myself despite what others thought. The importance of confidence and self-reliance was brought out throughout the investigation. I also learnt more about my peers. The participants were also intrigued by the results and learnt more about themselves.
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