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Post by Anna on Mar 20, 2016 8:13:17 GMT
Summary:I’m sure you all know the name game-- in its most basic form, it means going around in a circle and saying your name and all the names of the people who presented themselves before you. This study sought to find out whether the name game was actually more effective than the standard meet-and-greet (when one person, then the other introduces themselves). The authors conducted 2 experiments with university students in Lancaster (n=265 and n= 287) split into small groups (8-11 or so per group). Participants learned each other’s names using either the simple name game, the elaborate name game (add any other word to the name, e.g. ‘Niki’ and ‘popcorn’), or a control condition (either pairwise meeting, in Experiment 1, or repetition, in Experiment 2). They were then surprise-tested 30 minutes, 2 weeks, and 11 months down the road. The findings: the name game significantly improved students’ recall, but there was no difference between the simple and elaborate versions. In other words, the act of retrieving-- even when compared to repetition-- is more effective in improving recall.
Some discussion questions/topics to get you started (feel free to discuss things that aren’t on this list, of course):- In what ways is this study relevant to current HCI research?
- How could the findings of this study inform as yet unexplored territory in HCI research?
- What flaws/limitations does this study have? How would you redesign (thinking from an HCI perspective)?
- This study was published in 2000. Thoughts?
- Share your personal experiences with the name game in relation to this paper).
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Post by mrivera on Mar 20, 2016 22:04:56 GMT
The Name Game takes a similar approach to learning as studying with flash cards. There is some information that is associated with another bit of information. In cycling through the cards, the retrieval is consistently utilized to increase recall. One difference between the name game and flash card studying is that flash cards are usually resorted after cycling through the cards.
With in mind, I wonder how does ordering affect the recall of names? For example, if instead of naming the participants in order around the room each time, what if for each participant , the order for naming the previous people is randomized. The content of the names stays the same, but the place at which they are recalled varies. This seems to focus more on retrieval and less on the context during which the name was given (before X, and after Y).
Snark: Why did it take us 2000 years to realize that we remember names better when we retrieve them more?
<3
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aato
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Post by aato on Mar 21, 2016 4:48:19 GMT
Niki actually had us (the first years) do the Name Game on our first day in P&T last semester. The version we did was even more complicated than the elaborate version - we each listed a fun fact about ourselves (not just a one-word reference). As the authors note in the last paragraph, there were indeed severe scaling issues with a group size of 23. They write, "there are certainly limitations on the size of group for which the name game is practicable and alternative techniques are required for large groups for which the playing of the name game is too time consuming. However, the present study demonstrated that the technique can be used comfortably with groups of 11 members." It took almost the entirety of our 80 minute class. I do actually know everybody's name now though! =D
While I appreciate that the authors are candid about the limitation of this study, I'm still disappointed with the lack of generalizable knowledge. I understand that their argument is that 'retrieval improves recall' but they don't mention at all how this works for larger amounts of information (either larger groups in the name case or larger and more complex pieces of information, as in most types of learning). Learning names is a pretty common problem that groups face, but after reading the paper I have no idea what retrieval looks like for anything more complex.
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Post by anhong on Mar 21, 2016 14:29:57 GMT
The study demonstrated that using retrieval practice can help with learning. The second study’s comparison demonstrated that active retrieving is more effective than passive reception. And the first study showed no different between simple and elaborate conditions. However, the benefit of adding another property (e.g., “swimming”) might not be only better recall of the names. It provides more context of the person. Maybe generic properties like “swimming” doesn’t help much. However, during our classes and meetings, we always have people say their names, department and research interests. For this context, maybe having this extra property can help with the recall of names. Even not, it could serve as a useful hint when asking other people for that person’s name.
Applying this paper’s result to learning sciences, we can design systems that encourage more active retrieval activities by asking the students to repeat after the tutor. Or going beyond simply repeating and retrieving the same information, use similar but different exercises about the knowledge point immediately after the lecture could help with understanding.
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Post by nickpdiana on Mar 21, 2016 14:52:46 GMT
I had a similar reaction to Mike's. It seems that the author's might be missing the impact of spatial memory. This is really evident in the assessment, where they ask participants in the name game conditions to "sketch the rough layout of the room." Participants in the other conditions (in both Exp. 1 and 2) were missing out on a whole other feature to encode with the name. I'd also suspect that this extra feature would be more powerful than the extra feature in the Elaborate Name Game condition because it's in a different modality than "names" and "favorite activities."
This isn't to say that the entire effect is due to spatial memory. The similar results from the second experiment seem to support their hypothesis about retrieval being important, and the importance of retrieval in this kind of task has been demonstrated countless times (e.g., the testing effect). But experiment 2 didn't control for spatial memory either, so it's difficult to extract the precise impact of retrieval.
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toby
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Post by toby on Mar 21, 2016 14:53:19 GMT
Besides the main points of the paper mentioned above by other people, I'm also thinking about what implication does this study carry for the community building for online communities. I imagine for online communities / peer production systems, especially smaller ones or those with smaller clusters where the members will interact or collaborate with the same set of people regularly, having the members know and recognize each other should boost the engagement of the community and the performance of the group. However, being able to remember and identify peers' virtual identities through online interactions may pose different challenges than in classroom settings.
Taking this forum thread as an example, people took different strategies in choosing their names and avatars. Michael R picks an animated giphy of a man, Alexandra uses a cartoon avatar derives from her appearance, while Anhong and Anna use the default avatar. In my case I find Alexandra's to be the easiest to identify, but only because I've already known her offline. I think it would be really interesting to see the impact of avatar on the level of acquaintance within the community. Similarly for names, it would very interesting to see from both a community member's perspective on what to do to make their own identity easier to recognize, and also from a community leader/moderator's perspective on what strategies / activities are efficient to promote acquaintance in online communities.
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Post by stdang on Mar 21, 2016 16:25:33 GMT
This study, had it involved computers, could be a strong demonstration of how HCI can be investigated or applied in the world. It was an interesting demonstration of the impact that cognitive science can have on the design of an activity or intervention in order to improve it's effectiveness. In this case, the study showed that the name game actually goes beyond straightforward retrieval, but also leverages a mechanic that incentivizes participants to attend to names as they are stated in addition to providing repeated opportunities for retrieval. This social dynamic enhances the effectives of the game over a simpler intervention which simply emphasizes retrieval. In fact, this study is a fairly solid example of how education research can be done within HCI. It shows how to evaluate a common cultural practice for effectiveness as compared to alternative activities while also demonstrating how to apply cognitive science theory to also determine the cognitive mechanism that drives the effect of the intervention. This type of principled evaluation allows HCI and education researchers to not only determine the effectiveness of any given common practice, but also have a principled way to predict the likelihood of success of that practice if it is adapted to a slightly different context through an understanding of its mechanisms.
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Post by mmadaio on Mar 21, 2016 20:14:30 GMT
I'm also left feeling frustrated at the lack of generalizable knowledge here. The authors seem to make a convincing argument that increased opportunities for retrieval lead to improved recall, but it is not clear how this could be generalized beyond the name game for other contexts or different types of knowledge (i.e. conceptual or procedural knowledge, instead of single item recall). It's also not clear from this how the mediating factor of the social incentive they discuss (feeling pressure to successfully remember the names) impacts recall here, or how it could be leveraged to support recall elsewhere. Is the fear of public shame really the ideal way to improve recall generally?
Toby, that's a great point about online communities. Does this work apply to MOOC participants, or forum-based communication more generally? Is it more important that I remember the individuals with whom I've had positive interactions in some hazy, personal way ("that guy with the rabbit avatar" "the Office gif guy"), so that I can target them for future personal interactions, OR that I remember their name (user handle) so I can refer to them by name when talking to them and make them feel valued. It's also a non-problem in forums, when I can look at your username either for clues to your "real" name, or just refer to you as "stdang400xxx".
Also, seconding the issue of scalability, their recommended number is ~11 students, which is absurdly low. We saw that it did not scale well for a class of 23 students, and the norm for public school K-12 classes is 30 students. It's not clear how this could scale upwards, or what a maximum threshold for this is.
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Post by judithodili on Mar 21, 2016 20:44:25 GMT
I'm also responsible for this reading this week and Anna did a great job on the summary and starting questions.
Before we dive too deeply into the flaws of the paper, I'd like to move the discussion slightly to a different direction. Think about people who you've just met recently, and the ones you actually remember their names vs the ones you don't.
- For the former group (the ones you remember their names), can you elaborate why you remember their names vs the others?
- Did you subconsciously practice some of the techniques in the name game, to help you remember?
- If you used some other technique to remember their names, how would you design a HCI study to test its effectiveness?
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Post by judithodili on Mar 21, 2016 21:21:10 GMT
I agree with you guys by the way - I'm struggling with the generalizability of this study. It's difficult for me to connect their findings to a way that I can potentially design systems better.
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mkery
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Post by mkery on Mar 21, 2016 21:44:24 GMT
I was interested that the surveys given to students in no way measured their social connectedness to their peers. For example, beside each photo, could the students have given the name + the detail they recall and also a score 1-5 of how well they know this person? I remember all the names from the name game in P&T, but it is because I’ve interacted with all my classmates since. The names I remembered without struggle earlier on were those of people I interacted most with. The longitudinal effect of the name game the study is convincing, however they perhaps could discuss how the name game effected initial social connectedness. If the students recall more about their peers from the start, do they interact more?
This study could also have separated out the visual component they added to the name game: writing each student’s name on the board for spelling, into a separate experiment.
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Post by fannie on Mar 21, 2016 22:14:04 GMT
To start on Judith’s direction: hmm I often don’t remember someone’s name even if I have a more personal interaction with them, because the name is kind of something that’s said and forgotten at the beginning and then we move on to other topics. In something like a networking situation it’s harder to just do the name game by yourself in your head. For me, I think I might remember the name if 1. Not too many syllables 2. Something striking about it or the person (not too generic, or if the interaction was especially positive or especially negative), 3. can associate with the face (“she looks like a Judith”), 4. Some kind of incentive for remembering, like they’re related to my research area. So there’s probably something else there with storage/association/incentives, over the constant demand for retrieval. I think this is similar to what Toby/Michael M are pointing out with the online communities, where you might pick out their avatar, or remember them because you anticipate future interactions. But I would think it’s easier to remember a person’s username there where it’s used several times and “on the record”, as opposed to something like “that one guy/girl in class who always raises her hand.” I suppose the equivalent face-to-face might be the name tags like we had to do for ARM--but even then I usually look at someone’s face rather than their name (and to be honest, I remember the face but not the names of the non-HCII people in ARM…).
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Post by judithodili on Mar 21, 2016 22:36:46 GMT
To start on Judith’s direction: hmm I often don’t remember someone’s name even if I have a more personal interaction with them, because the name is kind of something that’s said and forgotten at the beginning and then we move on to other topics. In something like a networking situation it’s harder to just do the name game by yourself in your head. For me, I think I might remember the name if 1. Not too many syllables 2. Something striking about it or the person (not too generic, or if the interaction was especially positive or especially negative), 3. can associate with the face (“she looks like a Judith”), 4. Some kind of incentive for remembering, like they’re related to my research area. So there’s probably something else there with storage/association/incentives, over the constant demand for retrieval. I think this is similar to what Toby/Michael M are pointing out with the online communities, where you might pick out their avatar, or remember them because you anticipate future interactions. But I would think it’s easier to remember a person’s username there where it’s used several times and “on the record”, as opposed to something like “that one guy/girl in class who always raises her hand.” I suppose the equivalent face-to-face might be the name tags like we had to do for ARM--but even then I usually look at someone’s face rather than their name (and to be honest, I remember the face but not the names of the non-HCII people in ARM…). I'm with you Fannie - I too don't remember non-HCII people's names from ARM even though I remember their faces. I think the difference between this and online scenarios is that you typically see people's avatars side by side with their names, but in human-human interaction, you typically see one or the other. I suspect it may be different if everyone had to have their names on their foreheads so you see it constantly and associate it with their faces. |
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Post by jseering on Mar 22, 2016 0:31:17 GMT
Per Fannie's comment, I find that I'm much more likely to be successful at remembering somebody's name if I'm putting a face to a name rather than a name to a face. If I've read a bunch of somebody's papers and I meet them in person, I have something real already in my memory to attach their name to. If I'm meeting them for the first time, I'm introducing both a name and a face into my brain without either one being strongly set. I think this makes sense with what has been said, that memory works better as a pointer to an existing memory. A new face and a new name are pointers to each other, but maybe to nothing else. I could remember that I've seen the face and heard the name, but still not associate them.
A study that might test something like this would be to have participants read biographies of other people ahead of time (without pictures or descriptors of physical appearance) and then meet them in person, and see if having read about the people somehow anchors the name better.
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Post by francesx on Mar 22, 2016 0:38:15 GMT
First thing, I am very glad to see that there exists work and research on improving the learning of names. I am very (very) bad with names, and I have been looking for ways to save me in social gatherings, in particular when I am the leader/host.
There are a couple of things that I want to mention regarding the reading:
1. I would be really interested in a study that looks into other techniques for learning names in large groups (where name games are too time consuming)
2. I wonder if learning the multiplication table follows a similar principle: repetition+retrieval. Which makes me think, is this the most efficient way for learning (in general, but also names specifically). I can bring other aspects of learning such as foreign language (learning the meanings of different words), anatomy (learning different parts of the body, bones, muscles, etc.) Is there a way to decrease repetition and increase retrieval?
3. When we played the name game + fun fact in PnT last semester, I was seated somewhere in the middle of the group. Half way through this semester, from discussions with other students in the class, I could still remember most of the students' "fun facts". And not surprisnigly, (based on this paper) a lot of my peers could remember the others fun facts as well!!
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