The Effect of Priming on Test Scores

The Effect of Academic Priming on Middle School Students' Test Scores

Abstract

The problem examined in this experiment was whether educational priming affects test scores of middle school students. The test was on general knowledge gathered from PSATs, and the educational priming was a video that focused on the solar system. Each of the ten students watched the video for five, fifteen, and thirty minutes, taking similar tests between each session, and again without any priming. The students' test scores ranged up to a 55% difference in each independent variable, but each trial showed a general positive trend as the times of the video increased. The only level that was slightly off was the one taken after fifteen minutes, which was likely to be slightly more difficult.

Review of the Literature

Think of a song that plays on your alarm clock when it wakes you up in the morning. If it is the same song every morning, you mind is probably programmed into getting ready for school when you hear that song, even if it isn't coming from your alarm clock. When you hear the song, you might feel strange or be thinking about what you do at school, riding the bus, or your morning routine. This is the result of your mind being primed into thinking of those things when you hear that song. This is the same idea expressed in many priming experiments.
An experiment conducted by Dr. Marcus Raichle and Dr. Larry R. Squire (1987) showed for the first time the ability to display what parts of the brain are being used while the subjects carry out simple tasks. The experiment involved the subjects reading from a list of non-related words before being given a ten word beginnings seen previously in the word list. The subjects would complete the words by saying the first word that came to mind. For example, the first list may include the word "motor," and the subject would be given the word beginning, "mot-" In this case, the subject would most likely say "motor" because they were primed with that word. The results showed that the subject was not only using the Hippocampus, the chief memory organ located in the middle of the brain, but also the Visual Cortex, which records memories according to sight. Therefore, it is perceptive and requires virtually no comprehension of the word, but a mere perception of its letter shapes.
A representation of a long-term priming experiment was conducted at Stanford Graduate School of Business in September of 2006. One to four days prior to a course midterm, one group of students was subliminally primed with intelligence-related words, while the second was primed with words unrelated to intelligence. As predicted, the first group did significantly better on the midterm that followed. The experiment analyzes the effect of subliminal intelligence priming on more complex behavior.
In another experiment, conducted by Mark Chen and Lara Burrows at New York University, undergraduates were tested on the effect of courtesy priming on the amount of time that passes before interruption. In the first group, the students took a scrambled-sentence test, which there was a set of five words, and the task was to create a four-word sentence as quickly as possible. The test had words to do with politeness, such as "aggressive," "rude," "bold," "bother," "disturb," and "intrude" scattered throughout. The second group took a similar test, but sprinkled with words like "respect," "considerate," "appreciate," "patiently," and "polite." In both cases, the effects were so subtle, that the students weren't aware of what they were being tested on. After the test, the students walked down the hallway to speak to the person who was running the experiment for instructions. The person was always busy talking to someone else, and the test was to see if the people primed with courtesy would wait longer to interrupt. The first group waited about five minutes before interrupting, but the second group never interrupted at all, throughout the ten minutes the experiment was running for. This is similar to the last experiment in the way that the method of priming is with words, and in that the subjects take some sort of a test in each. It is different in that the first experiment is testing for long-term priming, while the second is testing for short-term.
A similar experiment was conducted by two Dutch researchers, in which students were told to answer forty-two Trivial Pursuit questions. Half thought about being a college professor, and wrote down everything that came to mind, for five minutes. The other half thought about soccer hooligans beforehand. The first group got 55.6 percent of the questions right, but the second group got only 42.6 percent of the questions correct. In the third experiment, the subjects were primed with thoughts instead of words, but the results were still just as significant. Like in the second experiment, the subjects were involved in short-term priming. In all three experiments, the subjects were primed with words or thoughts related to a specific topic.
I am conducting research on academic priming for my experiment. I am interested in the subconscious reasoning behind decision making, as well as how priming can affect our brain activity. I believe that as the independent variable, duration of the video, increases, the dependent variable, the students' test scores, will also increase. I would like to know if everyday elements such as this could have an effect on how well we do on a test. I also hope to learn why intuitive reasoning is more accurate than logical reasoning, and how other factors, such as academic priming, can determine the results of everyday activities.

Materials and Procedure

The materials used for this experiment were pencils, 4 eleven question verbal PSATs of equal difficulty, a Discovery Channel Solar System video, a TV, a DVD player, a timer, and ten kids of the same age, gender, and reading comprehension level.
The ten children were contacted and arranged to participate in the experiment, and a quiet working environment was prepared for the test-takers. Ten different people completed the first PSAT test, made up of randomly selected questions, after not seeing the video at all. After watching the video for five minutes, the same ten people completed the second PSAT test. After viewing the video for an additional ten minutes, the group completed the third PSAT test. The ten people completed the fourth and final test immediately following watching the video for an additional fifteen minutes. Test scores were recorded for each person on each test, and the mean, range, and standard deviation were calculated.




Results

The independent variable is the amount of time each student watched the video, and the data chart shows how this influenced the dependent variable, which is the test scores the students ended up with. The central tendency generally shows a positive rise in the test scores. After the students took the test without watching the video, the mean of their test scores was a low 60.91 percent. After watching the video for five minutes, the scores rose to 74.55 percent. However, after watching the video for ten more minutes, the students' scores decreased to 70.00 percent. After watching the video for a total of thirty minutes, the students' scores had risen to 87.27 percent. Though there was a relatively high range and standard deviation amongst the trials, each trial shows a positive inclination within itself. The range for not watching the video was 45.46 percent, the standard deviation 15.77. The range for the five minute duration was a similar 45.45 percent, the standard deviation 15.1. For the fifteen minute duration, the range and standard deviation were all time highs of 54.55 and 19.94. In contrast, the thirty minute duration had all time low range and standard deviation at 36.36 and 11.65 percents. In the hypothesis, it was predicted that the test scores would increase as the duration of the educational video increased, and, generally speaking, it was correct, with the exception of the fifteen minute duration.




Conclusion

         The purpose of this experiment was to determine whether educational priming in the form of a video affects the test scores of students with similar reading abilities. The hypothesis stated that students' test scores would show a general improvement as they continued to watch the video. The results showed that this occurred, and increased between thirteen and fourteen percent. This was also evident in other experiments conducted by various researchers in which they tested the rate of impatience among college students, who were primed either with words like "rude," or words like, "quiet." Other experiments include tests in which students thought of either sports or a college professor, and the students who thought about the college professor did better. Another experiment exhibits successful long term priming, in which college students were primed with intelligence words and words unrelated to intelligence one to four days before a midterm. Priming allows a given concept to occupy the subconscious, causing the subject to change his or her attitude, whether that may mean doing better on a test or acting more patient or rude to others. For further studies, other videos could be tested for similar results, or the scientists who did the impatience experiment could try waiting a little longer than just ten minutes, to see just how long the patient students waited before they finally interrupted. The fifteen minute should be changed in order to make the data more accurate, because it was probably slightly more difficult than the tests taken after the zero, five, fifteen, and thirty minute movies. Aside from priming, scientists could conduct a similar experiment involving the brain, but instead focusing on the memory.

Works Cited

Gladwell, Malcolm. "Primed For Action." Blink. 2005. New York: Back Bay Books, 2007. 52-61.

Hilts, Philip J. "Images Show Brain Recalling a Word." New York Times 11 Nov. 1991. 6 Jan. 2008 <http://www.nytimes.com>.

Lowery, Brian S., Eisenberger, Naomi I., Hardin, Curtis D. and Sinclair, Stacey,  Long-Term Effects of Subliminal Priming on Academic Performance. September 2006. Ed. Catherine Haga, Harjeet Heer, and Kim Simmons. Stanford GSB Research Paper No. 1946. SSRN.com. 6 Jan. 2008 <http://www.ssrn.com>.

Tulving, Endel, and Fergus I.M. Craik. The Oxford Handbook of Memory. Oxford University Press, 2000. google.com. 7 Jan. 2008 <http://books.google.com/>.