Nine groups made use of a counterbalanced (Latin square) design by randomizing task order and exposure condition across participants [ 15, 22, 23, 25, 29- 31, 48, 53].
Experiment 2 demonstrated this pattern in spontaneously strategic 4-year-olds, and, by systematically varying task order, eliminated the possibility that transfer tasks were simply more difficult.
The internal weber fraction is not affected by task order (t-test comparing number responded first trials and number responded second trials: w: 0.16±0.01 and 0.18±0.02, t = 1.22, p = 0.24, CI: [−0.01,0.05]).
A four-way ANOVA with factors Task Order, Attentional Task, Word, and Melody was computed to determine if results were influenced by the order in which participants performed the two tasks: Linguistic task first or Musical Task first.
Messner and Vosgerau [44] have recently introduced a new procedure of neutralizing this task order effect by adding iterations of the initial combined task and the reversed combined task to the procedure.
The pre-publication history for this paper can be accessed here: http://www.biomedcentral.com/1472-6947/13/65/prepub This work was funded by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Contract # HHSP23320095649WC, Task order HHSP23337009T.
We also analyzed the likelihood of students generating tree-like diagrams in relation to task order by calculating tree-like and non-tree-like frequency counts.
This project is supported by the DEcIDE Network AHRQ contract number HHSA290200500341I, Task Order #6.
The task order itself constitutes an additional important interfering variable.
However, we found that task order influenced student responses on a single tree building task.
