After the opening of the Basic Experiment Method Course on Monday, December 7, 2020, Mind, Brain and Behavior Laboratory continue to organize the event on Tuesday, December 8, 2020 to Thursday, December 10, 2020.
The agenda for the second to fourth day course are material about experimental research design to practice on arranging and analyzing experiment data.
On the second day, the session was start at 1.00 PM with the topic called Experimental Design and Sampling which presented by Dra. Sri Kusrohmaniah, M.Si., Ph.D. She deliver material about introduction of various experimental design, how to recruit participants, determine inclusion and exclusion criteria.
There are some examples of experimental designs including design comparison treatment control, pretest posttest control group design, factorial design and so on. Furthermore, she also share about experimental research she had conducted briefly. The research was implemented on rats, by giving alcohol and caffeine consumption for 60 days as the treatment, then she count the number of nerve cells in the rat’s hippocampus.
The second session was continued with material about Manipulation in Experimental Research by Bhina Patria, S.Psi., M.A., Dr. rer. pol. and continued with Analysis in Experimental Research by Wahyu Widhiarso, S.Psi., M.A. Wahyu explained the importance of understanding statistics in a research, especially experimental research. “The success of an experiment depends on the philosophy used by the statistics” he said. Furthermore, he also delivered about covariate and mediator analysis briefly.
On the third and fourth day of the training, participants were divided into 26 groups which consist of 5-6 people. During the third day, participants in the group were exposed with three experimental cases. Each group has to discuss about the experimental design used in the cases, based on the materials from the previous two days in the training. Afterwards, several groups will present the results of the discussions and Satwika Rahapsari, S.Psi, M.A., R-DMT and Galang Lufityanto, M.Psi, Ph.D. will give feedback to the groups.
Similar to the day before, on the fourth day, Thursday, December 10, 2020, each group was directed to discuss data and determine the analysis from the data set prepared by the committee. After the discussion, several groups will present the results of analysis, then it will be discussed together with Galang Lufityanto, M.Psi, Ph.D on the session after for feedback.
The training was closed at 5.00 PM, by giving post-tests to the participants followed by a closing speech session from Galang Lufityanto, M.Psi, Ph.D. as the head of MBB Laboratory. We hope that participants will have a broader understanding of experimental research by joining this event. If the experiment show incoherence results with the hypothesis, researcher could explore the data more and try different apporoach in analyzing the data. Furthermore, Galang said “Back to the mental set, it is important to be persistent and rigorous in order to find phenomena from the experimental data”.