Peer Review

Gorilla Experiment BuilderTeachers

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Reviewed:: Mar 27, 2020 by Teacher Education

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Ratings

Overall Rating:

Content Quality:

Effectiveness:

Ease of Use:

Overview:

Gorilla helps ambitious behavioural science teachers and/or students to use, teach or learn online experimentation through an easy-to-use graphical interface, where no coding necessary.

Collect behavioural data with accurate reaction times. You can build for free, however, you will pay per respondent when you implement your study.

Type of Material:

Development Tool

Recommended Uses:

This tool can be used to help students develop and/or implement online studies so depending upon the students level of experience with creating experiements or questionaires, the teacher could demonstrate in the classroom or assign as homework. Gorilla can be used by individuals but because it is a cloud tool teams or groups could work asynchronously on development and data gathering.

Technical Requirements:

A browser and Internet connection.

Identify Major Learning Goals:

1- Gorilla can be utilized as a code editor where its users can program their own tasks. Third-party libraries , whether for educational or educative purposes, can be imported to build tasks from scratch, or alternatively built in other frameworks .

2- Gorilla can be utilized as a task builder where users would add their own scripts to augment its behavioral efficiency for teaching purposes.

3-Gorilla can be utilized as a questionnaire builder, as users can add their own scripts to customize or enhance their questionnaires for educational purposes.

Target Student Population:

High School, College General Ed, College Lower Division, Graduate School, Professional and professional students who do research would all find Gorilla easy to use, however, with assistance, lower levels may also benefit. Anyone who researches could use this tool.

Prerequisite Knowledge or Skills:

Basic computer and Internet skills, and some idea of basic research methods would be useful for using this tool.

Content Quality

Rating:

Strengths:

From the student perspective, Gorilla replicates tasks that previous to the Internet had to be completed manually and usually face-to-face. The tool gives them the opportunity to complete their research in the cloud but still following the accepted concepts, models and skills for gathering data. All of this takes place through a clear, intuitive, graphical interface so learning how to code is not necessary.

Steps in running an online study include:

Build your tasks and questionnaires
Design your experiment
Configure your recruitment
Relax (this step is included because the onerous task of gathering the correct group in a room for the experiment has been eliminated due to the cloud)
Download your data

Potential Effectiveness as a Teaching Tool

Rating:

Strengths:

Again because no coding is needed, teachers are free to guide students in first-hand experience of experimental design, while at the same time giving them hands-on experience in the creation of questionnaires, how to build tasks and how to design experiments. Hands-on is always more engaging for any discipline. Gorilla can be used for any discipline where learning to do research is required at almost any level of learning.

Examples of research topics that are provided on the website include:

Attention- Attitudes - Cognition - Decision Making - Economic Games - Education - Executive Function - Language - Memory - Perception - Personality

The Questionnaire builder allows students to choose from a list of widgets that will help them create their survey. Each widget provides the student with a preview that shows how it will look and behave. Some widget examples include: TEXT ENTRY, COMMENT BOX, DROPDOWN, CHECKLIST & RADIO BUTTONS

For the Task builder, the student would create the task structure and then specify the trial content via a spreadsheet. Within the spreadsheet you can specify randomization at both the trial level and block level. You can present and collect a wide range of stimuli and responses.

The Experiment Tree lets you link together questionnaires, tasks and control nodes to create novel procedures.

Concerns:

The website is very clear that 'No coding is required', however, the option to code is available. This could be a pro or a con depending upon a student's skill level or interest in coding.

Ease of Use for Both Students and Faculty

Rating:

Strengths:

The Gorilla website is very easy to navigate with consistent layout and well-labled topics. They provide plenty of examples that will help a user decide which type of study is appropriate for their needs. Each topic provides at least several examples of 'Try it Out' studies that a user can test out.

A very robust and detailed page of support tools https://gorilla.sc/support including videos, tutorials, walk-throughs, and reference guides are provided. Users are also encouraged to use the Feature Request Form or to Get in Touch.

The Gorilla creators intentionally eliminated downloading any software as they determined it to be a 'barriers to entry, especially for study participants.

Concerns:

Although creating an online study is free, there will be an fee per participant if the study is implemented that might be a barrier to students who want gather actual data. However, Academic pricing is offered and they appear to be willing to work with department or lab pricing.

Other Issues and Comments:

Gorilla now provides Open Materials where you can publish your Tasks, Questionnaires and Experiments on Gorilla Open Materials, their open-access repository of research materials. Control access to your Materials using the permissions settings and then add additional information and images to explain your procedure. With preferred citation, you can include a link to your published paper.

For more information, see their Introducing Open Materials page.
Also consider contributing your creation to MERLOT!

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