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If you are concerned that potential participants will learn about the study from their peers, you might want to delay debriefing until a later time. In this case, you would record the participants' addresses and send them an explanation of the study at a later time. This approach will keep participants from disclosing the true purpose of the study to others, but it has the disadvantage of not allowing you to personally address participants' concerns or ask questions. An alternative approach is to debrief participants immediately after the study and ask them not to discuss it with other students.
Now it is your turn to try. Suppose that you are trying to decide whether music enhances learning or distracts from the learning process. You set up your laboratory with tables and chairs and have a CD player in the corner of the room. Your experimental conditions are soft instrumental music, the same song played softly but with lyrics, and no music. Participants are asked to learn a list of 30 words grouped into 5 categories, are given a 5-minute distracter task, and then are asked to recall as many words as possible within their respective categories. Participants were told that the study was investigating whether the same learning style is used across different tasks.
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