Reaction Time Experiment Step 3 – Collect and Organize Data

This is the fourth article in a series about how to design a simple reaction time experiment. (See the bottom of this article for the rest of the series.) Today, I will look at how to collect and organize the data for this science fair project.

You will find it helpful to make up some data sheets to write down the data you will be collecting. See this Reaction Time Test Data Log Sheet for a simple example. If you use this approach, you will need at least one sheet for each group of subjects. For example, if you used this hypothesis:

I think that people in who are between 10 and 20 years old will have a faster reaction time on average than those who are younger than 10 or older than 20.

then you might have three groups – those under 10 years old, those between 1o and 20, and those over 20. Or you might do 0 to 10, 10 to 20, 20 to 30, 30 to 40, etc.

Next, carry out your procedure and record the results on your data sheets. Calculate an average for each person and an overall average for each group.

Tomorrow we’ll look at drawing some conclusions from the data and presenting the results.