My St. Lawrence University Summer Fellowship project focused on finding an economic valuation for the difference in learning between passive and active online follow-up interventions. I wanted to look at and compare different kinds of follow-up interventions for workplace trainings. I intended to put on a 30 person training and test the effectiveness of having them complete some follow-up learning at 4, 7, and 10 days before being tested 14 days after the initial training.
My advisor and I made the decision to push data collection to the fall as it was not practical to attempt to complete this during the summer. This gave me the opportunity to do a lot of research into the subject and examine how I wanted to carry this out. The extra time led to me choosing to enlist the help of Lindsey Tropper J.D., M.H.S., as she is the Title IX Coordinator here and carries out many practical trainings throughout the school year. All incoming first years are required to complete a Title IX training before they arrive. Additionally, every year, all members of the Executive Boards for student organizations and all student-athletes must complete a training. The current structure of these trainings consist of a pretest, 80 minutes of videos, and a post test. Every Title IX training is the same and many students must complete the same thing every year.
Lindsey is not happy with this current format and so I am working with her to design and empirically test different kinds of trainings. We are looking to examine how different combinations of lecturing, active participation, practical scenarios, and follow-up learning affects our participants experience and the extent to which they learned our material. My testing consists of a 15-question Likert scale survey and multiple open-ended questions that I will run through the language analysis software LIWC-22. This opportunity to include Lindsey in my project led to an expansion in my goals. I became interested in testing a wider variety of training types and not just follow up learning modules. I am excited to get the results back over the course of this fall semester.