[gsaines]

Hey cvboss, thanks for giving it a spin!

Yeah, we really do need an instructional demo video on the "try it page." We actually just got the front page up, so new instructional demo videos and the like are on the way. It's good to know people actually want them, and sorry for any confusion.

Regarding you interest in seeing success stories or incentives, we are going to conduct a study next semester with a big batch of students so that we can make claims about the efficacy, is that the sort of thing you're looking for ("With Skritter, you can learn character 44% faster than with traditional methods, see our study") or would it be more enticing to see small narratives from users about how much its helped them?

[briansmith]

"With Skritter, you can learn character 44% faster than with traditional methods, see our study"

What are your criteria are for verifying the validity of the study? I've proofread lots of graduate papers about studies of second language acquisition and in almost every case the studies are summarized the same way: the results are (un)promising but no definite conclusions can drawn because the sample size was too small and/or there was too strong of a selection bias and/or there were some other significant flaws in the study. A study that would justify such a bold claim would be, as far as I can tell, a landmark study in the field--likely worthy of a Ph.D. People could probably get Ph.D.s just for studying your study! :)

[nwinter]

Control group vs. Skritter group, track the time they spend spend studying characters specifically, give them a huge quiz at the end of the semester--not enough? You're right that we can't get a large sample, but we can get a large effect because the Skritter method will drastically favor long term retention.

[briansmith]

I, personally, would only feel comfortable making quantified claims like that if they were verified to be statistically significant. I asked some SLA researchers what would be required to get a statistically significant result and their responses were really discouraging. It's really hard to get definite results even with huge student populations across multiple schools. Because of what they told me, I dropped the idea of making such claims about my own software. Instead I'm going to market it a different way.

I think many people will be interested in the results of your study. Do you know when/where the results will be published?

[nwinter]

No, we can't even start it until next semester. I did do a smaller study last year that showed average writing retention rates of 38%, and it'll be easy to destroy that. Maybe if SLA research is too tight to penetrate, we can still go the transparent web data presentation route.

[girk]

If you're interested in getting more students on board to take part of initial group to be tracked, feel free email me at melgirk at the only email service worth using.

[cvboss]

I am not sure buddy, but it would be nice to see how it fits or replaces(?) the traditional approach from a high level perspective :)