LABORATORY #7

Name: Castor, Mark Joseph M.

Experiment Title: Serial Position Effect

Time: 30-60 minutes

Materials/Subjects:

1. Pen and paper for each participant

2. A list of 15 to 20 unrelated words or pictures (can be created by the experimenter)

3. Stopwatch or timer

4. Classroom with enough seating for all participants (at least 10 participants)

Purpose and Reason:

The objective of this experiment is to investigate how the position of information in a list affects

participants' ability to recall and recognize that information. The serial position effect refers to the

tendency for individuals to recall and recognize items at the beginning and end of a list better than

items in the middle. it is expected that participants will recall and recognize items from the

beginning and end of the list more accurately than items from the middle. This pattern of results

is known as the primacy and recency effect. The primacy effect refers to better recall of items at

the beginning of the list, while the recency effect refers to better recall of items at the end of the

list.
Procedure:

1. Introduce the purpose of the experiment to the participants, emphasizing that their participation

is voluntary and their responses will remain anonymous.

2. Divide the participants into groups of approximately equal size.

3. Provide each participant with a pen and paper.

4. Instruct the participants that they will be presented with a list of words or pictures that they need

to remember.

5. Present the list of 15 to 20 unrelated words or pictures to the participants, either by writing them

on the board or distributing printouts.

6. Give the participants a fixed amount of time (e.g., 2 minutes) to memorize the items on the list.

7. After the memorization period, instruct the participants to write down as many words or describe

as many pictures from the list as they can recall in any order they prefer.

8. Collect the participants' responses.

9. Analyze the data by calculating the percentage of correctly recalled items corresponding to

each serial position (beginning, middle, and end).

10. Plot the data on a graph, with the x-axis representing the serial position and the y-axis

representing the percentage of correctly recalled items.

11. Discuss the results with the participants, explaining the concept of the serial position effect

and how it influences memory recall.