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Running the Pilot Study

October 5-9
What we've all been waiting for - we finally got to run the Pilot Study!
The beginning of this week I spent time doing final preparations for the pilot study. This included making a few edits to the problems on ASSISTments after we found a few bugs when practicing, creating a google spreadsheet to record participants' answers to interview questions, and preparing the work space in the lab so that it is experiment ready.
At the end of the week, we had three participants scheduled. Only two participants ended up showing up, so we will be on the lookout for more participants. A PhD student in the lab and I ran the studies; we made a pretty good team! 
Both of the studies went really well. Over all, the participants thought the questions were pretty easy and went through them really quickly. The only ones they got tripped up on were probability and the complex expressions problems. Depending on how future pilot study participants feel about these types of problems, these will most likely be the topics that we use for our full study!