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afeller08 comments on Open Thread, Apr. 27 - May 3, 2015 - Less Wrong
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Additionally, I'm a little worried about the control group part. I expect it's relatively easy to recruit people to play a game and have them be motivated to play it, but if I tell people that "oh, but you may be randomly assigned to the control condition where you're given more traditional math instruction instead", I expect that that will drop participation. And even the people who do show up regardless may not be particularly motivated to actually work on the problems if they do get assigned to the control condition, especially given that I'm hoping to also educate people who'd usually avoid maths. How insane would it be to just not have a control group?
If I were designing the experiment, I would have the control group be to play a different game instead of having it be maths instructions.
You generally don't want test subjects to know whether they are in the control condition or not. So if you're going to make it be maths instructions, you probably shouldn't tell them what the experiment is designed to test at all, until you're debriefing at the end. If you tell people you are recruiting that you are testing the effects of playing computer games on statistical reasoning, then the people in the control condition won't need to realize that what you're really testing is whether your RPG in particular helps people think about statistics. They can just play HalfLife 2 or whatever you pick for them to play for a few minutes, and then take your tests afterwards.