Re: What kind of project would be suitable for the topic of left-handedness?

Dear Billy, 

            there are a few articles on the web which you might like to 
read to orient yourself before deciding on your study:

www.sciam.com/askexpert/biology/biology23.html
www.indiana.edu/~primate/brain.html
www.indiana.edu/~primate/92mphil.html
www.indiana.edu/~primate/lspeak.html
www.indiana.edu/~primate/
www.webmasters.net/qde/Qdefaq.htm
www.lefthandpublishing.com/book.review.html

For an 8th grader project, a study on ~30 subjects would be ambitious if 
not impossible. You will avoid disappointment if you clearly define the 
goals of your experiment and stick to the golden rule: Keep It Simple. I 
would encourage you to choose a study with a definite, ideally yes-or-no 
answer. Here is one idea:

(Q is for the question you are going to answer; M is for the Method of the 
experiment. I would suggest taking four left handers and four right handers 
for this experiment.

Q1: does handedness affect the ability to learn a skill with the 
non-dominant (the not-usual) hand? 

M1: Hold a ping pong championship with three differences. Difference 1: 
everyone plays with their non-dominant hand. Difference 2: even when the 
champion is determined, you hold playoffs to determine the full rank order. 

for example, john, susan, alex and vikki are the winners of the first heat:


alice
           john
john              ________

susan
           susan
bob                        __________

jake
           alex
alex             
 
nick                  ________
           vikki
vikki 

suppose susan beats john and alex beats vikki. Then susan and alex play for 
first place, BUT ALSO, john and vikki must play eachother to determine who 
is the best and so on for the first heat. You can then determine an overall 
rank order. (To shorten the process, for the first heat, assume that anyone 
who beat person X who beat person Y would also beat person Y directly; this 
does not always happen, but you will be there forever if you try to play 
all the permutations.)

Difference 3: you play the whole championship twice over and record the 
rank order for the second championship.

Interpreting the results: 

Look at the rank order for the first and second championships. Compare the 
improvement (or worsening) in rank order for left handers versus right 
handers. Do right handers learn better than left handers to adapt 
to their unfamiliar hand? Remember there are no wrong answers in science. 

I would be interested in hearing how you get on. 

Good luck.

Dhugal Bedford

ps Billy, the Mad Scientist posting indicates that you are about 11yrs old, 
but given your posting, I suspect that you might be an adult teacher. If 
this be the case, and you are planning to publish your work, you will need 
to be more rigorous than I have suggested here (for example, statistical 
tests for significance in change of rank order, control for prior abiltiy 
in ping-pong, more subjects, more than two 'championships', etc). 

------------------------------------

 Dhugal F. Bedford, M.A. D.Phil.

   http://pubweb.nwu.edu/~dfb611/

         e-mail: db@nwu.edu

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