The Repeated Reading Project: Introducing the Diary Study

Remember last year when I used this blog as praxis for studying German grammar ahead of a test?  Well, if you hated that you're not going to enjoy the posts in this series.

I've decided to kick up my Estonian a notch, and I'm going to see if I can spur myself into action by attempting a diary study.

What's a diary study?  It's a type of research in which the researcher is also the researched - they use themselves as the guinea pig, and keep a diary of their progress.  The diary is then analysed and the findings are written up as a paper of some description.

It's kind of like a case study performed on oneself.

I think there's an element to which it is a bit dodgy.  Nothing scientific where the observed and the observer are the same person is ever really that great.  For one thing, the observer's paradox is compounded in multiple ways.  The subject's behaviour alters because she/he is being observed, what the observer notices is altered because she/he is expecting to notice certain things...

And this feeds back into the noticing hypothesis, in which one learns what one notices - so the fact that the researcher is intentionally looking for certain things means she/he is specifically noticing those things, and is then therefore more likely to learn those things.  Under different circumstances, the subject(s) might not notice (and therefor learn) those things at all (or might notice and learn different things).

Plus, any findings are statistically insignificant.

I wouldn't base any decisions on a diary study, unless that decision was "hey, let's try turning this into a bigger study with more people who are observed by other people", but they do give some interesting data, which can be combined with data from other case studies and larger-scale studies to give some actual basis for real decision making.

Maybe the results of this diary study will be useful for research in the language acquisition and reading in a foreign language fields.

Primarily, I've decided to do this specifically because it will give me a reason to a) remember to keep the project going, and b) prompt me to keep a learning diary.

Remember what I said above about the noticing hypothesis?  It really works - the more attention you pay to something, the more likely you are to actually internalise it and remember it later.  Keeping a learning diary is brilliant for that.  Unfortunately, unless there's a due date attached to something, I usually forget to do it - even if it is incredibly useful.

So, I'm going to keep a learning diary (posted on this blog), which will become the primary source of data for my diary study.

What's the actual project, you say?

I'm glad you asked.  See the next post.