You can use the Card-Swipe machine to semi-automate the attendance and participation information. The Card-Swipe is a touch screen computer station placed behind the podium in the lab.
To employ it, do the following. First, turn on the touch screen computer. It will automatically load to a “LEMA lab sign-in” screen shown below. Notice that if a subject does not have their card, they can check in by providing their 9-digit PSU ID or their Access Account ID.
After switching on the card-swipe machine, you must return to the Experiment Recruitment website on the podium and enable the card-swipe functionality. To do so, view your experiment. Then view the specific session you want to work with.
You will see a ‘Bind-Kiosk’ option above the list of subjects registered for this session. The Bind Kiosk drop-down provides three options:
Select the “Attendance” or “Participation” option to bind that action to the kiosk. At this point, subjects can swipe their ids and upon doing so the “Attended” or “Participated” column will be automatically updated as show below. A suggested way of using this feature is to bind the kiosk in attendance mode at the beginning of a session and bind it again in the participation mode toward the end of the session.
If the kiosk is not bound to the session and a subject tries to sign in at the kiosk, they will receive an error message.
If the ID provided via the card-swipe interface belongs to a subject who is registered for the session that the kiosk is bound to, their attendance and/or participation information will be updated. Note that you must refresh the session management page to see the updates made via the card-swipe interface.
There can be cases where a subject attempts to sign-in but is not registered for the current session. For example, the subject may have registered for a different session, may be trying to participate in a second session of the experiment, or may be a walk-in. A walk-in subject may or may not have already signed up to the LEMA subject pool.
- If the subject has not registered in the LEMA subject pool, they will receive an error message. To participate in the session, the subject must first sign up at http://lema.smeal.psu.edu/study. Once the subject has created and saved their profile, they can register for the session via the kiosk or the researcher can add them to the session from the session management page.
- Walk-in subjects who are registered in the LEMA subject and are not registered for a different session of the same experiment are added to the current session (the notes column states that the subject is a ‘Walk-In’).
- If a subject who is not registered for the current session is registered for a different session of the same experiment, the subject will receive a message asking them to speak to the researcher. At this point the researcher can advise her to come back at the scheduled time (if it is in the future) or the researcher can manually remove the subject from the future session and add her to the current session. If the subject had registered for a past session, the researcher should check her status. If the subject participated in that session, she may not be eligible to participate in the current session (multiple playthroughs are not allowed). If the subject registered but did not show up, the researcher can add her to the current session. The researcher can remove the subject from the previous session but we recommend leaving the previous registration as-is to calculate the show-up rates accurately (unless there is a valid reason to remove that entry).
After running a session, please do not forget to enter here the attendance and participation information subjects who did not use the card swipe functionality, as well as the earnings information for all of the subjects. Click on ‘Update Subject Registrations’ to commit this information to the database.
Finally, please select the ‘Unbind from Session’ option from the ‘Bind-Kiosk’ drop-down to remove the binding. If the binding is not reset, future card swipes will continue to update subject registrations for this session.
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