Does consent form comprehension affect the rate of consenting participants in educational technology research?

Advances in technology are increasing the risks of participating in educational technology research. Data can more easily be aggregated from multiple sources, from both inside and outside of the classroom, and is beginning to include physiological data. Yet, few studies in educational technology research relate to informed consent processes that evaluate approaches aimed at improving participant understanding of risks and the effects of such approaches on participant likelihood to consent. This data set includes raw data from a study on informed consent involving 127 first year undergraduate students that consented to participate in educational technology research. Best practices to informed consent were adopted for the study such as making use of an enhanced consent form and a comprehension quiz. Results of the study suggest that attempts to facilitate participant understanding of data sharing risks via guiding questions in a prior knowledge questionnaire resulted in lower consent form comprehension quiz scores, yet higher rates of consent.

The data set is composed by:

• ‘Classes’ spreadsheet: including the relation of flows, group of students, number of students, instructor id, day and time
• ‘Participants’ spreadsheet: including the relation of ID (of each participant), if s/he consented, group class, flow and language
• ‘Prior knowledge Survey’ spreadsheet: participant’s ID and ID, relevant prior knowledge questionnaire data (questions included).
• ‘Quiz data’ spreadsheet: participant’s ID, quiz data and survey data (questions included)