An example from my own experience

As our computers, and particularly our smart phones, become more and more extensions of ourselves, we continually find new uses for them for interventions in various stages of the learning (or teaching) process. Numerous institutions of higher education have found that reminding students that their papers are due, or that they have to study for an exam, via SMS can be an effective means of keeping them on task and focused on completing their studies. There's nothing particularly "experimental" in interventions of this sort ... unless faculty at these colleges decide to examine their effectiveness and then publish their findings. So, if instead of simply sending SMS messages and hoping for the best, faculty members decide that they want to compare the effectiveness of these messages against sending a message via email, or trying to phone students, or simply doing nothing at all, suddenly we've got an experiment that may ethically require them to ask permission, particularly if they intend to publish.

And today studies of this sort really are getting published, and numerous sites report on them. I admit to having somewhat of an anti-academic-research take toward most of these. After all, if we discover that SMS messages have a positive effect, the next step will be examining the content of these messages - how long should they be, what verbs are more likely to generate positive responses, which personality types are more amenable to prodding of this sort, and the list goes on. The basic objective is a worthy one, but I doubt that there's a best, or most correct, method of using SMS messages for this purpose. It would make more sense to simply run things up the flagpole and see how many people salute.



Go to: What isn't an experiment?