Before you can create and manage sessions you must create an entry for your experiment. To do so, log in to the experiment recruitment website. The first time you log in, the website will ask you to update your profile information. Then go to the Experiment Management page by clicking the Experiment/Sessions link under the Manage tab on the upper right-hand-side of the home page.
Click on the ‘Create Experiment’ button on the Experiment Management page to create a new entry.
Next, you should see a page that asks you for the details of your study, Please see below for the description of each field.
Public Name (required) – This is the name that the subjects will see for the study. This name allows researchers to use generic names to control the extent of the context and purpose of the study that is conveyed to the subjects before they arrive at a session. The public name must be unique. If you choose a name that has already been used, you will receive an error message.
Project Title (required) – The project title will be used as the main identifier for the study on the website. The project title is visible only to researchers and not to the subjects. All researchers who have an account on the LEMA website can see project titles (see section on other experiments) so projects titles should loosely reflect the title of an associated research article. The project title must be unique and the system will warn you to change the name if you use a name that is already in use.
Description (required) – Please provide a brief description (similar to a short abstract) in the description field. LEMA will include the project title and description along with the names of researchers in its annual report of research activity in the lab.
Remarks (optional) – You can use the optional remarks field to enter study specific notes to yourself (this field is visible only to the researchers associated with the study and the site administrators).
Keywords (required) – In the keyword section, please choose all keywords that are applicable to your experiment. Click on the keyword box to see a list of available keywords and select all applicable keywords, one at a time. If certain keyword(s) are not available in the list, please email lema@smeal.psu.edu to have the keywords added to the list.
Purpose (required) – Please indicate whether the current study is a research experiment (default) or has a different purpose. Studies with a purpose other than research are created with a ‘Pending’ status and require administrator approval. You will be able to create sessions for a non-research study after a LEMA administrator approves the study.
IRB number (required) – You must also provide the IRB number of your study. If you do not include an IRB number for a research study, the initial status of your experiment will be “Pending” and you will not be able to create sessions until a LEMA administrator approves the study.
Private URL (optional) – If you require subjects to know of the study prior to registering for your experiment session, specific a private URL for the study. You must then share this URL with the subjects who are eligible for signing up for the study.
Hide experiment – If you want your sessions to be public (meaning anyone with a PSU ID can register for them), select the “No” option under the “Hide Experiment?” question. Otherwise, students will be unable to see the experiment or any session, regardless of session settings.
Enable multiple playthroughs – Set this option to yes only if you want subjects to participate in more than one session. The default setting is no which prevents subjects from participating in multiple sessions of the same study.
When you are done, click the “Create Experiment” button. After that, you should get a green message that says the experiment has been created.
If you go back to the Experiment Management page, your new experiment will be listed under the ‘My Experiments’ tab. If the experiment status is set to approved you can add sessions to it. You can use this page to manage all your experiments (view/edit/delete).
The ‘My Experiments’ tab lists all your studies. The studies are sorted in descending order of the last session date as a default. You can click on the column headers of the table to change the sorting order and/or column.
The ‘Other Experiments’ tab lists all other studies (created and run by other researchers). For each of these studies, you can see the project titles, keywords, the name of the researcher and the last session date. The information on the tab allows for a broader awareness of the experiments being conducted in the lab. This information can be helpful in determining if you should exclude subjects who have participated in specific other studies from participating in your experiment due to their experience with a specific game or to reach out to other researchers with similar research interests as yours, etc. You can click on a researcher’s name to email them.
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