Hello All:
I had a great week in Sweden and Denmark and will be peppering in pictures I took from the IceHotel (Yes, it is what it sounds like) and Copenhagen throughout the blog post. This week was not only exciting one for me because of travel, it was also an extremely important week for my research project. I finally finished the paper (sort of). Though I still have a lot of editing a cutting down to go before the paper takes its final form, the all sections of the paper are finally done. At the beginning of the year, I couldn't even imagine what was going to become of my research paper. Now that I have the 23 page behemoth sitting in front of me, I can't believe that my work has really culminated into a tangible product. I'm extremely proud of how far we have all come as a class and am excited for the rest of the journey.
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| The ice room my mom stayed in |
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| The ice bed Will and I slept on (it had a mattress don't worry) |
In order to ensure that my paper is the best it can be, I need to go back and understand what is strong and why and what is weak and why, so I can make the weak parts and ultimately the whole paper strong. Overall, I think my paper is pretty strong right now, but it can and will be greatly improved before I turn it into the college board. I am a little over the word count (600 words, which is comparatively not that much), so I need to fix that and become a little bit more concise with my ideas.
I feel like the strongest parts of my paper are my discussions of each of the effects individually in the literature review and the explanation of the specific methods and changes for each effect in the methods section. In both of those parts, I am pretty concise and clear, which is important to understanding the paper. In my literature review, I think I clearly convey the prior research and how different sources converse with each other. I feel like I especially do this in the time-pressure section when I discuss the conflict between Dhar and Nowlis's ideas about choice deferral and Young et al.'s findings on risky behavior in time-pressure situations. That section of my paper shows a clear gap, which is imperative to a great literature review. In the methods section, I feel like I do a great job of laying out the changes that were made for each group and explaining how those changes provide a standardized way of measuring behavioral changes.
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| Copenhagen |
The weakest parts of my paper I think were the transitions and the statistical significance portion. In terms of transitions, I feel like I sometimes tried too hard to justify moving through the paper and sometimes I didn't include anything. Although I have improved my connection between the subtopics greatly over the course of the year, I still feel like the different effects can be connected better and more smoothly in the paper. For my statistical significance section, I feel like I just gloss over the significance and need to beef that section up a lot. Although I do discuss the less than 10% increase being negligible because that is less than one person, I do not really do anything else to show why my results are significant. If I want my paper to be great (which I do), I will need to fix this section as well as my transitions.
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| Northern Lights |
I hope you have enjoyed the pictures from my trip throughout the blog post and that you enjoy reading my paper. (613)
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| One more northern lights picture |
I love the northern lights!
ReplyDeleteYou'll definitely have to work on cutting down the paper -- I would try to tie ideas more closely together and synthesize topics as a way of not only cutting down words, but also bolstering connections in your paper.
I think you've done a good job of pointing out specifics for your classmates to focus on in peer editing.
Hey Maxwell!
ReplyDeleteSo I definitely agree with you that the discussion is the strongest part of your paper. You make reasonable conclusions, you talk about how it corroborates or goes against other studies, and you talk about how it fills the gap. You really did a great job on your discussion.
I will also agree with you that the portion where you discuss statistical significance needs a little bit of polishing. My only issue is that traditionally in statistics, significance is determined by looking at a calculated p-value (that gives you the percentage of variation due to chance) or a confidence interval. You can't really just say it went up 30% (or whatever the 30% was for) and call it significant.
Here's where I'll disagree with you: I didn't think your transitions were weak. I think you did a nice job and it made the paper flow really well which made it a fast read. That's definitely a good thing. The only transition that was kind of abrupt to me was the one into "Behavioral Influences." I think I said this a couple times throughout your paper, but try not to start a paragraph with a source. If anything, rearrange the sentence so "According to..." is not the first thing the reader sees.
Also because I wanted to and since I told you I would in my comments on your doc, here's a shorter (i think) explanation of the rules. You don't have to go crazy into every detail. Just talk about the ones that concern the results. You don't talk about busts in your results or discussion so there's no need to spend two sentences on it when you give a general overview of the game. Just make it quick. Yours was 188 words.
"Both the player and dealer begin with two cards. Since the objective is to keep the sums of the cards under 21 (or reach exactly 21), "risky behavior" begins when the player relies purely on chance when choosing to hit (add a card to the hand) or stay (leave the hand as is). When a hit leads to a number larger than 21, it is called a bust. In case of no bust, the highest sum of cards between the player and the dealer wins. (85)
Anyway Max, you're doing really well and you should be really really proud of yourself because your project is so well done and your paper is really good as well.
I am excessively wordy. I'm sorry. I ramble.
ReplyDeleteHi Max! I really tried to focus on your transitions. I agree that you definitely tried really hard, and in doing so you relied too heavily on one style or formula of transitioning. However, the information is still there so it should mostly be an easy fix of rewording or reorganizing some information. I also saw some things like passive voice. But, overall your paper is really strong and i really enjoyed reading it. the one overall thing i have as well is that i want more from your significance. i think the gambling industry point from the beginning of the lit review gets slightly lost.
ReplyDeleteHi Max,
ReplyDeleteI think what you did the best in this paper was synthesizing sources and putting them in conversation with each other. You did this throughout and it was really seamless and added to your research rather than bogged it down. I also agree that your discussion section was organized and in-depth with your results being compared to past literature and the possible future directions. Also, the way you introduced your gap was awesome, very organic and thought-out.
I think the major things you need to improve on are quite simple to edit. I found there were a lot of places where you could combine sentences. Especially in the statistical analysis portion, there were places that needed justifications and evidence for things like why numbers were significant or why 4 seconds (half of 8 seconds) was considered the time-pressure time. I also felt there could be more explanation of certain studies you used like what are the other stimuli that could affect people's decision making in the casino. You also use definitions as transitions a lot, which can seem repetitive, especially when you defined the term earlier. I think generally you did a good job with transitions.
Overall, you did an awesome job and I found your style of writing allowed for the paper to flow really nicely and be well-supported.
Hey Guys!!
ReplyDeleteThanks os much for the detailed feedback. Mrs. Haag and I talked during my meeting and I will be changing my graphs a little in order to make the statistical analysis portion stronger and more understandable. I will just be going from a baseline of risk-neutral to no risk, so the results will be the same but just with slightly different numbers. I agree with you guys about condensing sentences as well as cutting down my word-count. I also agree that I can make transitions stronger and stray away from passive voice throughout the paper. Thanks so much, once again, for all the hard work. I'm really optimistic about the direction my paper is going!!