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Participation types

Participation types

Owned by Harmony Jankowski, created
Last updated: Mar 25, 2025
2 min read

 Wondering who should participate in your experiment and how you should decide?

Terracotta includes 3 options for student participation. You’ll decide which one will work best for you when you set up your experiment; here’s a description of each one.

  1. Students will be invited to consent

  2. Teacher will manually decide

  3. Automatically include all students

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Students will be invited to consent

If you want to (or if your IRB requires you to) create an Informed Consent assignment, this is the option you want.

  1. Please refer to the Quick Start Guide for instructions.

If you create an Informed Consent assignment, be sure to set its Canvas due date before your first regular assignment open date. If a student accesses an assignment that isn’t the Informed Consent assignment first, they will automatically be excluded from your experiment.

Teacher will manually decide

If you’re working with minors and collecting parental consent, this option will allow you to indicate manually which students should be included in the experiment. Click continue to show 3 categories: participating, not participating, and unassigned.

  1. Begin by clicking the “unassigned” dropdown, and then check the boxes next to the students you would like to move to “participating,” and click “move to,” then “participating.”

  2. Then, check the boxes next to the students you would like to move to “not participating,” and click “move to,” then “not participating.”

Automatically include all students

Choose this option if your study does not require informed consent.

One of the basic principles of ethical research is showing respect for research participants. One way of showing this respect is by providing people an opportunity to make decisions for themselves about whether they want to participate in a study.

Distributing participants

Not all participation types or experiment types allow you to decide how to distribute experiment participants. If your experiment has more than one condition and exposes your participants to only one condition, you will need to decide how to distribute your participants. Here are your options:

  • “Even” will divide participants evenly (and randomly) between your experimental condition(s) and your control.

  • “Custom” allows you to choose a percentage of participants to receive each condition.

  • “Manual” allows you to put participants into particular conditions directly.

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