Multi-university research to explain behavior in laboratory and fieldto be aided by wireless equipment, compatible programs

BLACKSBURG, Va., June20, 2001—Virginia Tech is one of eight universities that will share a $2.3-million National Science Foundation grant to develop infrastructure in social sciences.

This virtual collaboration will link research, software development, and web-based teaching techniques developed by members of the team and by others in related disciplines. Most of the principal investigators for the grant are already working together on related projects of social science and management applications. The research is focused on explaining actual behavior in laboratory and field situations. The grant is based at the University of Virginia’s economics department, where the principal investigator is Charles Holt of the economics department.

Catherine Eckel, professor of economics at Virginia Tech, receives $220,000 of the grant to develop a portable wireless laboratory for conducting experiments in classrooms and at remote sites. The group of investigators includes economists, anthropologists, political scientists and others—a tight experimental community. Researchers from seven universities besides Virginia Tech—the University of Virginia, CalTech, Vanderbilt, Rice, William and Mary, Georgia State, and Harvard—will conduct different research projects under the grant. For example, the projects of Eckel and other members of the group to develop portable wireless laboratories will allow for experiments at remote sites such as the Soviet Union or isolated cultures in Africa and with populations other than the usual college students. "We can expand the groups we can study away from college students, which significantly enhances the validity of our research," Eckel said.

One part of the grant proposal includes a library of programs for conducting interactive decision-making exercises that people from different disciplines can run on an Internet-based system from a server where all the programs will reside, she said. This will remedy the situation in which researchers at different locations and from different disciplines have to "start from scratch" each time they want to conduct an exercise because the software at each location does not cross platforms. Several university groups will develop web-based interactive programs to teach a variety of concepts in economics and other disciplines. The programs are called experiments and are interactive situations in which the participants’ incentives depend on their own and others’ actions. Game theory has been used to model a wide variety of environments, such as collective-action problems, market pricing, auctions, committee voting, family decisions, organizational behavior, and contract law negotiations. Under this grant, the researchers develop experiments to test the game theoretic models. Game theory is applied in political science, management science, and related fields, as well as in economics.

Eckel and Rick Wilson of Rice University, for example, are studying a single social signal—facial expressions—to learn more about factors that influence interactions between people in situations such as negotiations or financial transactions. The researchers isolate facial features by showing stylized icons and photographs so the participants have no other information than the facial expression. To control all other influences, it is important that the participants not know the people in the pictures, so a virtual lab would allow them to use facial expressions of people at another location in the experiments.

The portable laboratory also will allow Eckel and her colleagues to look at children and the way they learn economic skills or the way risk attitudes change over a life cycle. One related project, funded by a grant from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, will use the portable lab to implement decision-making exercises designed to measure risk attitudes, time preferences, cooperation, and other factors that may ultimately be useful in identifying at-risk children in schools. A related project, undertaken by Eckel and a team of researchers at Virginia Tech, is designed to extend the educational use of these experiments to large classes. A great deal of research about active or participatory learning, Eckel said, shows that students retain more of the lesson if they are active in learning it. Economists have developed experimental learning exercises, such as trading in a market, producing a public good, or negotiating with another person, that illustrate ideas taught in classes. The exercises put students into the environment being studied so they can see how the market or political organization works from the inside. When the theories being taught are confirmed by the results of the games, they become more credible. Active learning exercises enable students to apply their learning to new situations more easily, Eckel said.

For example, in a market game, students play the roles of buyers and sellers, and they can watch the bids and offers prices converge to the price predicted by supply and demand theory. By asking questions that highlight pressures to raise or lower prices, the students can discover for themselves how theoretical concepts such as supply and demand explain behavior. Another exercise can show how some individuals may not contribute to a public good such as public radio when they enjoy the benefits regardless of whether they contribute.

"We at Virginia Tech are developing a system that will let us run these experiments in large classes and at sites without computer labs," Eckel said. At present, there are not enough laboratories to run the experiments in large classes, and hand-processing such experiments in large classes is too time consuming and does not provide the benefits of immediate feedback and the ability to change an outcome by using different parameters available through the computer. "So we’re developing a wireless experiment for learning in large classes," Eckel said.

The team is currently testing a device called a Cybiko, a wireless, hand-held computer for teens that uses wireless technology to "chat." Using a Cybiko, the students can participate in economic games through a wireless server and see the results projected on a screen in the front of the room. The professors can change the parameters of the game to show how results will change. Students can follow up later because the information is saved on the computer and can be posted on a web site. The system is called Wireless Interactive Teaching System (WITS) and is being developed by Eckel, Sheryl Ball of economics, Kevin Oliver of Educational Technology, and Scott Midkiff of Electrical and Computer Engineering. The funding for this project comes primarily from the Virginia Tech Center for Innovation in Learning ($57,000) and from the Andrew Mellon Foundation ($50,000). This project currently supports three undergraduates and one graduate student working on the system. The system will be field tested next spring using one class with Cybikos and one without.

The system can be used to teach about price floors and ceilings, public goods, environmental policy, voting (collective decision making), and market structure (monopoly vs. competition). "There are dozens of programs available now," Eckel said.

Eckel hopes the portable wireless laboratory will make economics more user friendly for students. Non-economics majors sometimes find economics to be baffling and do not understand it as a way of thinking, she said. "Experiential exercises can make a difference in their seeing how to use economics in their lives," she said.

Another part of the NSF grant will fund workshops to teach graduate students and assistant professors and others not familiar with the system to use interactive experiments in teaching. The researchers will take the prototype wireless laboratory on the road to disseminate and demonstrate software, research breakthroughs, and teaching techniques. They will learn how to run experiments, how to use them, how to access the web programs, and how to design experiments to address teaching problems teachers have identified. They also will pre-test these newly designed experiments. Eckel hopes next year they can demonstrate the wireless system, or WITS, in the workshops.

Researchers: PI: Charles Holt, 804-924-7894, [email protected]
Also: Catherine Eckel, 540-231-7707 [email protected]