The Match Begins: Written vs. Verbal

Overview

Objectives/Goals Do you do better at a task if you see the instructions or if you listen to the instructions? I am trying to figure out whether written instructions are better or whether verbal instructions are better. Methods/Materials Materials: 1. Written Instruction Paper 2. Verbal Instruction Paper 3. Legos 4. Tape recorder 5. Camera 6. People 7. Blocks Method: First, I gathered eight different colored blocks and legos. Then, I created the verbal instructions and written instructions. I found a suitable place to hold the testing. For the investigation, I got people to try to stack the blocks and legos based on the two different instructions that were given. First, I gave them written instructions to read for a minute. After, they had to stack the blocks and legos. Then, I gave them a tape recorder to listen to. Then, they would stack the blocks and legos based on those directions. Results I found out that overall written instructions were much better. Females scored better than males but for both genders, the written instruction scores were greater than the verbal instruction scores. Then, for all age groups, written did better than verbal. Out of the thirty-two people who were tested, nineteen people did better at written, six people did better at verbal, and seven received the same score for both written and verbal. I did a retest for all my subjects, and the scores went up. The written scores were still higher than the verbal scores. Conclusions/Discussion Since the testing shows that the written instruction scores overthrew the verbal instruction scores, I can conclude that my hypothesis was correct, that written instructions scores are better than verbal instruction scores

Competition history

• CSEF 2007 Cognitive Science (Junior Division Only) · Entry J0622

Resources

• CSEF project summary ↗

Related projects

Closest projects by meaning, across every fair and year in the corpus.

Browse more like this

• All Behavioural and Social Sciences projects
• CSEF Behavioural and Social Sciences projects
• Every CSEF 2007 project