Thesis Data Gathering

My wife needed to gather data for her Master’s thesis, so I created a web application using PHP and MySQL to make data gathering much simpler.

For her thesis, students had to listen to three passages in German. Students logged in to the application using their student ID, and were assigned to one of eight treatments. During their treatment, they listened to the three passages. After each passage, they had to respond by entering as much about the passage as they remembered.

There were eight treatments, and depending on their treatment, during one of the passages, most students had to click every time they heard a specified grammatical feature. Student responses were collected and stored in a mySQL database.

The entry page of the application was a login page. Users logged in to the application using their student ID number. (Before the beginning of the study, we pre-populated the database with the usernames and treatment numbers of each of the students.) They saw a consent to treatment page (required by University policy), and when they clicked “I accept” were taken to a biographical page. Students volunteered biographical information that was used for classification purposes when the data were analyzed.

Depending on their assigned treatment, users listened to the passages in varying orders. On the listening page, users clicked the Play button to listen to the passage. They could only click the play button once per passage.

Once they had finished listening to the passage, they clicked the Continue button. They were taken to a page where they entered all the information they remembered from the passage.

At some point, all users (except those assigned to 2 of the 8 treatments) were required to listen for a specific grammatical feature, and click a button each time they heard the feature. The application counted the number of times users clicked and stored that information in the database, along with what they entered when requested to type everything they remembered about the passage.

At the end of the survey, users who listened for a specific grammatical feature were asked whether or not they thought they paid more attention to meaning or form during the passage where they were listening for the feature.

I did all the HTML, CSS, PHP and MySQL coding for this project by hand. I used Adobe Photoshop to create the banner image and borders.