MV Project Thesis

The research question is basically this: Can b-school students develop expertise about financial markets by reading web-based market commentary written by "experts"? Experts in this case are individuals who have a proven track record of success in financial markets. One stream of thought, based on a time-tested model of novices learning from masters, suggests that such learning may be possible as students learn by observing what the experts are doing (essentially, what the experts are doing "rubs off" on the student). One counter argument, however, is that the gap between sage and protégé may be so big that no learning, or perhaps even "negative learning" might occur. The basic hypothesis we're testing is:

Exposure to web-based financial commentary will be positively related to the development of market expertise.

The financial website used in the research is Minyanville. This site was chosen primarily because a) the founder of Minyanville, Todd Harrison, is a friend of mine and he's quite interested in helping us test our core hypothesis and b) Minyanville's business model is centered on education (rather than financial advice)--as such, it offers a venue where our chances of significant findings are decent (in other words, if our core hypothesis can't be confirmed here, it probably won't be confirmable anywhere).

The research design looks something like this:

All participants complete a "baseline" questionnaire to gather data on initial knowledge, interests, backgrounds.
Participants are randomly assigned to one of three groups: 1) a "control" group that does not get the website "treatment," basically does nothing during the experiment and serves as a reference group, 2) an "unguided" group that gets the website "treatment" but receives little instruction on what to look for while on the website, 3) a "guided" group that gets the website "treatment" plus some guidance about what to focus on while reading content on the website.
Groups 2 and 3 are given passwords to Minyanville and data sheets where they can record the time spent reading website content. These groups are also given a brief orientation for how to navigate the site. Group 3 also gets a set of topics/questions aimed at "guiding" them during their website exposure.
For six weeks, students from Groups 2 and 3 read Minyanville website content on their own time. Importantly, there is no time minimum or maximum expected. This is up to each student. We are only asking that students accurately record the hours spent on the site, as this is our key measure of student "exposure" to the experts during the study.
After 6 weeks, all participants complete a second questionnaire that assesses knowledge, interest, and background factors similar to the first questionnaire.

Your role as a participant is over at this point. My role as an analysts begins! Scooping up your extra credit points will be contingent on your completing the two questionnaires, plus submitting a completed (to the best of your ability) set of data sheets in which you record your time spent at the site and some "guiding questions." Individuals in the control group would have no data sheets to complete.

btw, I hope to share at least some preliminary findings with the participants as further "reward" for participating.

One final note. Participant identity must be known during the data collection phase of the study. Why? We need to match questionnaires and data sheets to the same person throughout the study. We could get fancy and give out numbered codes for each person, but I just don't think we need that degree of sophistication. I am trying to point out, though, that you can't participate anonymously. This might be a "deal breaker" for some, but hopefully not. Please rest assured that, once we obtain your data and plug it all into rows in a spreadsheet, then at that point you will indeed become "anonymous." Follow?