Educational Psychology

Client

Karina Mucha - a psychologist and academic lecturer. She has created various textbooks and agendas for early childhood and preschool education.

Problem Statement

Educational Psychology has seen rapid growth and development as a profession in the last twenty years. There are a lot of materials in English but very few in Polish language.

Being in the educational environment Karina Mucha has seen a void on the Polish market and decided to fill it with a new online product. The biggest question was: How exactly should it look like?

Team & my role

I was working as a UX Researcher together with 3 other UX Researchers (our former student group). On each stage of the project we closely collaborated with Karina Mucha and consulted all the deliverables.

Scope of work

• Research scenario
• Screener
• Respondents recruitment
• In-depth interviews
• Analysis of gathered data
• Report

The proccess

Educational psychology is the branch of psychology concerned with the scientific study of human learning.

Educational psychologists are working side by side with psychiatrists, social workers, teachers, speech and language therapists, and counselors in an attempt to understand the questions being raised when combining behavioral, cognitive, and social psychology in the classroom setting.

Methodology

In the beginning we've formulated research problems:

• What content and in what form should be provided to the users of Educational Psychology portal so that it is interesting for them?
• When would they be willing to take paid online courses related to this topic?

In search for answers to our questions we've decided to conduct qualitative research - in-depth interviews, which is a useful source of ideas and explanations.

• 10 interviews
• 1 hour each
• 3 persons took part in each interview - respondent, moderator and observator

Screener

Considering where educational psychology is used, we looked for candidates among people involved in working with others and interested in psychology, pedagogy and teaching. To recruit proper respondents we prepared a screener in a form of survey in Google tool.

• 4 standard questions (to see if someone is a good fit for ux research):
  • age group,
  • participation in a survey for the last 6 months,
  • the device on which the responednt browses the internet most often,
  • availability on a selected date.
• 4 specific questions (to see how much someone could be interested in our topic):
  • What is your learned profession or field of study? (if more than one - list all).
    (open answers)
  • What is your current profession?
    (open answers)
  • Have you taken any courses on psychology, education or learning?
    (single select answers)
    YES, stationary and online / YES, only online / YES, only stationary / NO
  • To what extent do you agree with the statement: "I am interested in psychology and modern education, including learning processes, the functioning of the human brain, the emotional, social and cognitive development of children and adults, new discoveries in the psychology of development and personality."?
    (single select answers)
    strongly disagree / rather disagree / I have no opinion / rather agree / strongly agree

We've shared our survey on facebook thematic groups for psychologists, teachers, pedagogists etc. and we were surprised how hesitant people were to take part in the research. Although at the bottom of the survey there was an information about privacy and who exactly will proccess gathered data, we often had to explain more as people asked a lot. So we've learned how important it is to put visibly, in introduction information about the company and research, of course without revealing too much of the topic.

Mismatched choice of one respondent

One of candidates did not quite fit the screener, but due to the fact that he works a lot with children and teenagers, we decided that it will be one, slightly different case, hoping we will broaden the horizons of our research. Ultimately, however, it turned out that we mismatched a lot and the recruited person hardly used the internet and trainings, and moreover, he was not interested in it due to the very small amount of free time. Therefore, in most cases it was not shown in the report. It was a lesson for us to always stick to the screener.

Report

The report we've prepared to sum up the research consisted of introduction to the subject, plan of research (methodology, recruitment of respondents, research objectives, research questions) plus analysis, conclussions recommendations divided into 5 topics:

• Ways of learning
• Using the Internet
• Psychology and modern education
• Courses, authorities, certificates
• Games

and summary recommendations at the end of report.

Lessons learned

After closing the project we've summed up our work - what went well and what should we correct next time.

• Communicate visibly, in introduction information about the company and research.
• Always stick to the screener.
• Better time management - allocate more time for analysis of gathered data and creating the report.

And that's how Karina Mucha summed up our collaboration (KAMP - our team Karolina, Aneta, Małgorzata, Piotr):

Best regards and thank you again! Great job KAMP!