Resultal for teachers: A complete lesson plan for practical assignments in applied psychology
Research methodology and data collection finds its way to more and more classrooms in (higher) education. As a result of the global pandemic and subsequent lockdown, more attention is devoted to online data collection and fieldlabs. As a teacher or lecturer, it can be difficult to keep on track with the latest developments in the curriculum, let alone to draft new lesson plans.
Therefore, in this tutorial we provide all the required elements for a complete lesson plan for a practicum assignment on working with mobile research tools in (higher) education. This specific lesson plan has been implemented in the course Brand, Design and Psychology and is intended for a practical seminar of approximately two hours of working in small groups. It provides a step-by-step guide for students to build their first online study to measure brand perception. But, of course, feel free to adapt and change the plan to your liking to engage your students the most.
Below, we will provide a shortened version of the lesson plan. The full version is available for download as a pdf on our website, completely free of charge! [download pdf on our website]
Practicum Assignment
The following instructions will help you to create your own brand logo preference survey within the research platform Resultal.com (a self-service of WorldBrainWave).
As this is an assignment with fictional questions, it is purely intended to introduce you to the platform. Successfully completing these tutorials will result in your first survey that can be modified and expanded to measure brand preferences by stakeholders, such as employees or customers. Lets start:
1) Creating an account
- Go to https://www.resultal.com/.
- Click on ‘Order’ at the top of the screen.
- Fill out the details and confirm. One account per group is sufficient.
2) Demo experiment
To see what the survey of this assignment looks like, we already created a demo you can view. You will notice that the survey can be accessed both by following the url https://wbw.one/exp/2xwkfkxn or by scanning the QR-code with your smartphone (the platform generates both for mailing or media purposes, or use at locations where you want to conduct studies).
The survey you just saw is what your ‘participants’ see as well. The back-end of the platform where you can create the experiment and the tasks is for your eyes only. In this assignment we will create the same short logo preference survey with two brand logos, a multiple-choice question to rate the logo of choice, and an open question for participants to give additional comments about the logo of choice.
First things first
- Please read this document entirely, before you start working on the assignment. This helps you to get an overview of the assignment.
- Within this assignment we use three types of questions: ‘Image Statements’, ‘Multiple choice with statements’ and ‘Open Questions’. Remember these, because you will need them later. The former provides options to choose and rate logos, while the latter provides the option to give additional feedback on the given choice.
3) Familiarize yourself with the platform
- Now it is time to see what the platform looks like from the researchers’ perspective (i.e. you).
- Go to www.resultal.com/ and click on Login and User (in the top pulldown menu at the right), and fill out your username and password.
- On the home screen you will see the main menu on the left side.
All the necessary options can be found here. - For a quick start (with animations), please read this first:
https://medium.com/@resultal/setting-up-your-first-study-with-resultal-in-three-easy-steps-a-guide-for-beginners-11d71d48d235 - For a complete in-depth FAQ (contains information on all of the options), please visit: (https://worldbrainwave.com/faq.php)
- As you have seen, in general, all experiments contain three layers: Experiment, Tasks, Questions. See it as a cupboard (Experiment) with drawers (Tasks). The Questions are like the ‘papers’ in the drawer.
- Furthermore, you can add Instructions at the start of every task and you can (de-)brief your participants at the start and end of every experiment.
Now, go to the step-by-step instructions sheet on the following pages to create and test the Brand Logo Preference survey.
Instructions sheet
1) Create an experiment
- Click on Experiments in the menu on the left
- Click on Add New
- Give you survey a proper title
(note: you can leave the briefing and debriefing blank for now, we will get back to it at the end of the assignment in Finalizing your study) - Click on Save at the bottom of the screen
- You now created your first experiment! Notice that it immediately appears on your experiment screen:
2) Create the tasks
- Currently, the experiment is just a shell and does not contain any tasks or questions. Let’s add tasks to the experiment. We’ll start with the first task:
- Click on Manage Tasks
- Select Create New Task (green button in the top bar)
- In the pop-up screen, add an appropriate title for the task (e.g. “X and Y logo comparison”) and select Image Statements as the task type.
- Add instructions for your participants. Something like
“After clicking ‘Next’ you will see two logos.
Which brand logo represents our purpose most adequate?” - Optional: Select the option ‘Show questions in sequential order’, this will prevent the questions from being presented randomly if you want to use more question pages (or do not select this option to show them in random order).
- Now, select Add / Update to add your task to the experiment. It will immediately appear in the task list for your experiment:
- Apply the same steps for the second task (Multiple Choice with Statements).
- Select Create New Task again. In the pop-up screen, add a title for the task (e.g. “Logo rating”) and select Multiple Choice with Statements as the task type.
- Add instructions for your participants. Something like
“Next, you have to rate the logo of your choice.
Click ‘Next’ to go the multiple-choice question.” - Next, add the last task (Open questions). Follow the same steps, add title (e.g. “Logo comments”) and select Open questions as the task type.
- Now you have all three tasks added in your brand logo preference study:
Note: The Task title, instructions and task type can be updated, edited or deleted at any time by selecting ‘Edit’ or ‘Remove’ on the tasks screen.
3) Create the questions for the Image statements task
- Similar to the Experiment, when you create a Task it is an empty shell, like an empty drawer in a cupboard. Therefore, it is time to add the questions we will display to the participants. We’ll start with the first task.
- Click on Experiments in the menu on the left, and select at the Experiment page the task “X and Y logo comparison”
- In your task screen, click Manage Questions (green button)
- On the new screen, select Add New (blue button)
- Here you can add the two images from which you can make a choice. In our case, we insert the logos by uploading them to the website.
Please notice, there is no option to add a question at the same page, as this is a stimuli choice task where you do not want distraction from the imagery (you can use the instruction field at the Task screen for a question — that will be shown before the image choice page). - As shown in the preview on the next page, select the ‘Browse’ buttons to upload the logo images.
- You can use the logos above or grab the images from the demo. If you want, you can create your own logo set (each image 250 x 250 pixels)
- Select Create New Question (blue button, at the bottom of the screen)
You now will see the question like this:
Note: The question details can be updated, edited or deleted at any time by selecting ‘Edit’ or ‘Delete’ on the Tasks Questions screen
4) Create the questions for the Multiple Choice with Statements task
- Click on Experiments in the menu on the left, and select at the Experiment page the task “Multiple Choice with Statements”
- In your task screen, click Manage Questions (green button)
- On the new screen, select Add New (blue button)
- Here, add your question (e.g. “How does the logo you have chosen convey the message of the brand?”)
- Create the answers (e.g. “Excellent; Very good; Good; Just good enough”):
- Select Create New Question (blue button)
Please notice, you can use an image with almost any question type.
If needed, use the Stimulus Image option (in the blue bar at the right).
Select the ‘Browse’ button to upload an image, which should have the proper dimensions of 250 x 350 pixels for best results on mobile phones.
5) Create the questions for the Open Questions task
- Click on Experiments in the menu on the left, and select at the Experiment page the task “Open Questions”
- In your task screen, click Manage Questions (green button)
- On the new screen, select Add New (blue button)
- Here, add your question (e.g. “Do you have suggestions to improve the logo you have chosen?”)
- Select Create New Question (blue button)
- You now created the tasks and questions needed for this assignment.
Note: When you get familiar with the platform you probably don’t create all tasks beforehand but add questions straight away in the task you’re working on. So, you can test tasks right away. But for clarity purposes we used this setup in the assignment.
6) Test the experiment
- When you are finished with the questions, it is time to test the survey before you can distribute it.
- Go to Experiments and find the orange button that says Test url
- With this link you can test the experiment as many times as you like. No data will be collected or saved.
- Make sure to test your survey with diligence, you don’t want any errors in the questioning because it might disrupt your data. Test till you are sure the experiment works properly, and you are satisfied with the result.
- Of course, this is just an assignment to get familiar with the platform, but if this would be part of your surveys for the branding case, it would be time to distribute it. You can do so by selecting the grey button (QR + code). Here a QR-code is generated that you can send to your participants, or you can use the link on the same page.
7) Finalizing your study
- As you have seen by creating a task, you have the option to insert the following fields:
- Study Information / Informed Consent: this is the information participants see at the ‘I agree to the terms’ page. This is a short explanation of the purpose of your study and how you use gathered data explains your rights as a participant. This field is required to comply with EU-privacy regulation.
- Briefing: this is the first ‘welcome’ page of your actual study. You can use this to welcome participants and to give a (very) short introduction of the survey
- Debriefing: this is the last page of your study. Here you can say thank you to the participants or add some final remarks
This is the end of this tutorial blog, for the remaining parts (overview of the survey, viewing the data and downloading the data) please go to our website to download the pdf-version for free!
