PIRE II

This past week, I traveled back from Beijing, flying from Beijing's Capitol Airport to Frankfurt, Germany, and then to Dulles Airport in Washington D.C. -- the trip was long, (and I'm still reeling from the 12 hour jet lag), but I'm glad to be back in the United...

This week was somewhat of an impromptu 'rest week', due to a gap in participant schedules. Coincidentally, this week also lines up with Beijing Normal University's graduation celebrations, so I'm sure a majority of the students are busy this week with celebrations,...

Hi everyone! I hope your experiments and overall PIRE experiences have gone well. Our EEG experiment has gone wonderfully so far, and I can't believe I'll be back at Penn State in two weeks from today. This week, I wanted to share my time hiking the Great Wall of...

Because our research is going so great, I decided it was time for a weekend getaway. Me and my friend pengpeng (a BNU graduate student) took the high-speed rail over to Xi'an. The trip from Beijing to Xi'an is over 24 hours by car, but the rail got us there in around...

Hi everyone! I hope your PIRE experiences have been going well. Due to an IRB update, we were not able to test any participants last week. However, by the time this week ends, we'll have tested 11 of our 30 participants! We have also filled all 30 of our testing...

Hi everyone!! I hope you have all enjoyed your PIRE experiences so far! I have an exciting update to share for this week's blog post: yesterday (on Monday), my colleague and I completed our pilot testing! I'm happy we decided to do this, as it allowed us to see what...

This past week, I have been busy getting the final preparations for my EEG experiment finalized. This has included communicating with both my PI Dr. Sandberg and my PhD Student Parisa, as well as finalizing the Consent Form and Learning History Questionnaire Forms...

Today marks exactly a week that I have been in Beijing. This is the first time that I have ever traveled outside of the United States, and already in this week, my eyes have been opened to how vast this world really is. From riding the high-speed metro and exploring...

Last week, we decided that I will stick with testing Chinese native bilinguals since I still have 10 participants waiting to do the real experiment. However, I wasn't able to do any session last week because I got my wisdom tooth taken off last Friday and hope it got...

For this week, what I did mainly was to pay my participants who either have completed the survey or the experiment session. Some of my participants want Chinese Starbucks gift card and some prefer US Amazon. It's a little messy at first, but I think I am pretty...

Yesterday I finished my first session with two Mandarin native bilinguals because I haven't heard from any of the English native ones. Starting with running experiments with them was still workable because we still can collect data about testing bilingual's memory of...

In the last few weeks, I have been working hard to try to recruit as many participants as I could. Though recruiting the English native bilinguals was not easy, I have many Mandarin native bilinguals in my bag. Here comes to my first good news, in our last PIRE...

As I read posts by our PIRE fellows, I felt a little behind because I haven't heard from the English native bilinguals who are very essential and crucial for my study. I think we are on our way of finding a way of reaching out to this group of people and we will see...

This week was not so different from last week that I am still waiting for more participants for my study, and the real situation is that, I didn't hear from any new participants this week. This is a little discouraging to be honest. However, I noticed that most of my...

To be honest, I didn't have experience with lab researching before doing PIRE. I was nervous about what should get done before what, and worried about how to run an experiment by myself. For the last couple of weeks until now, me and my fellows prepared all the sites...

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...