First Survey

I conducted survey number one on Friday for the a.m. and p.m. AP Psychology classes. That's fifty responses!

I do not want to speak too soon about the results of the survey because I still need the responses from the teachers (hopefully on Monday) and I do not want to in any way impact the results for psychology students who may read this blog. That said, I can say that between both classes, 40% of the students are male, and 60% are female, 74% of the students are an age between 13 and 15, and 26% between 16 and 18.

The scores range across the board, but no, there is no score that is "good" or "bad." I was asked that question a lot, especially by the students of the p.m. class (they seem a bit more competitive). The a.m. class did great; they were very quiet throughout the process, and quick to submit their results. The p.m. class had more issues. The students were more noisy, and it took about twice as long for all of them to submit their surveys, about twenty minutes instead of the ten from the morning class. Because of this, I do have concerns that some of the students of the p.m. class may have cheated and played the game multiple times to improve their score despite having been asked not to and informed as to how this skews and invalidates data. Because my sample size will be fairly large, especially with the teachers, I am not worried that the results of a few students will impact the experiment overall.

I am excited to introduce the music... that should be interesting.

So Many Solutions

This week has been more relaxed.

The music therapy intern is in her last week of her internship before she will be officially hired by Neurologic Music Therapy Services of Arizona (NMTSA), so while she will still be around after Friday, she will not be at the daycare center with me and the therapist. She is really passionate about what she does and is also fantastic at it, so I'll miss her but I know she will continue to do great things. She promised me she'll bring her viola on Friday so we can duet "name that tune." I look forward to it.

This week in the lab has been one GIANT immunohistochemistry experiment. I have never seen so many slides used in the protocol simultaneously. Because there are so many slides, the protocol requires large amounts of certain solutions that we use for the immuno. I have made about 14 liters of  this buffer solution called TBS, which maintains the pH of the slides in the solution, as well as liters upon liters of other solutions such as Citric Acid used to limit unnecessary binding between antibodies and antigens (see previous post "Immunohistochemistry" for explanation of how IHC works), and Imidazole to enhance correct staining of whichever antigen we are targeting.

Finally, a quick update on the experiment I will be conducting, it is beginning soon! Likely Friday or sometime next week. I'll keep you posted.