My sister Aimee and I were delighted to take part in the BT Young Scientist for the second time this year. We started researching our project in the summer and ,our main rule for the idea was to mould it around something we dealt with in our daily lives. When entering 5th year we found it very difficult to motivate ourselves towards study and speaking to our friends we realised we weren’t alone. When we investigated the reasons this may be happening the intention action gap was something we came across so we centred our project around this.
We learned that this is a psychological enigma which entails the misalignment between what you say you will do and what you will do. We explored the intention action gap with student study habits to see if there was any prevalence and what effect it had on students. We investigated by the use of a survey, focus group and a longitudinal study to see if our solutions would be viable for the problem.
Our main findings were:
- The intention action gap is extremely prevalent among our exam year cohort.
- That intrinsically motivated students bridge the gap better than externally motivated students.
- Students are more likely to complete short term goals versus long term goals which is in line with Norma Foley’s exam reform.
- That only 37% of students know about study techniques based on learner type (audio, visual and kinesthetic)
- That our accountability system and educational intervention helped improve student study goal completion and S.M.A.R.T (specific, measurable, achievable, realistic and time bound) creation
Having the honour to go to the BTYSTE Exhibition for a second year now was an incredible experience. It was much more enjoyable this year as we knew what to expect with the judges and how it all worked. The experience was brilliant for our communication skills. We met many TDs from our constituency including John Lahart, Ciaran Cuffe and Cllr Vanessa Mulhall who were all so lovely and Interested in our project when we spoke to them! We were also interviewed by Morning Ireland which was an amazing experience. Having the opportunity to also feature in newspapers such as the Irish Times, The Echo and Tallaght News with our project was really cool.
We were really not expecting to win due to all the amazing projects in our category. Hearing your name called in the award ceremony, the first reaction was shock followed by pure happiness and is truly a moment we will never forget.We just want to say thank you to everyone at TCS for not only giving us the opportunity to enter but for being so openly supportive, we could not have done it without you! Bringing home a award to show for your support truly is the least we can do
-Ashlee and Aimee Keogh
