This week, there was a last minute problem! I had to share the experiment room with another lab conducting a different experiment. To solve this problem, I ultimately communicated with them and we worked around each other’s schedules. At first, I tried to move the...

This week, I experienced the struggles of having many participants away from the university because it was the start of their summer break (the Beijing Normal University English majors summer vacation started this week)…and some participants I did have cancelled their...

Some of my favorite moments this week came from speaking with some of the participants. I love seeing how different participants have different strengths in learning English—some have great vocabulary, some speak so naturally…some want to become translators, some are...

This week, I experienced the craze of scheduling participants. There are many China-specific aspects to running experiments with university students…for example, experimenters regularly communicate and pay participants through the popular, all-encompassing social...

This week was a great week of working with Katrina to get the project up and running, ready for participants! With her help, we could work past issues such as the computer set up being confusing, and the eye tracker equipment (the mount) being a different type than...

This experience has taught me a lot about resilience and also has taught me a lot about trying to work through the difficulties involved with running an experiment overseas. This is also the last week that Carly, the other PennState student, and Eric, the PennState...

I've been back in the states for a few days now, and I'm taking some time to reflect on the past 8 weeks I spent in Beijing. The last few weeks went very well as I was able to find the perfect number of individuals interested in participating, and collected the data I...

These past few weeks have gone by so quickly, and during them I was able to make up for the first few weeks, where I was facing some errors with the experiment crashing. I was worried originally that I wouldn't be able to find more participants to test, as the past...

This week has been notable because of how helpful and accomodating the Chinese graduate students in my research lab have been with me. Particularly my friend Lucy has been kind in helping me gather the necessary materials to start my experiment, and with contacting...

This PIRE week, from June 3 to June 7, was a great week! I moved into the housing and the streets were very pretty near my place. I walk the streets to get to the bus stop, and pass by many convenience stores on the way there. At the research laboratory, I have met...

                    Since the last time I shared a blog (sorry for the delay- was having trouble with internet service!), many events have occurred... Testing has been going well overall, we have figured out a lot about what was going wrong before, and everything is...

So much has happened in these first few weeks here. I've been meaning to post on the blog, and haven't realized how quickly the time has flown! Testing has been going pretty well- I've run into some issues with the experiment related to the computer- it seems the...

Wow, where to begin... If you had told me a year ago that I would be able to go abroad and conduct research, I would have asked you to not ... I have been learning Mandarin Chinese for about a year and a half now, and when I began to learn, the thought only briefly...