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From: "Noelene Jeffers" <njeffers@hotmail.com>

Dr. Cardoso

     I am a student in the Virgin Islands and I would like to do a science fair project on memory retention(short term) on students in my school. I really need some help to locate other studies done on that same topic.  If you would be so kind to send me any kind of information, I would greatly appreciate.  Thank you. Gracias.

Noelene
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Dear Noelene,

I am sorry for the delay in answering your question.
Although you have already the general topic, by locating similar studies you should
decide what will be your approach with short-term memory tests applied to students. General topics are very difficult to complete. Therefore, you should state the question that your project will try to answer (e.g. acute stress during exams? effects of caffeine on short-term memory? fatigue caused by mental workload? distraction of students either in classroom or during reading studies? impairment of cognitive performance associated with high levels of dietary restraint?) Those students will be normal or will they with learning disabilities? Adolescents or adults?

After you decide which will be your research line, you will be ready to do the next step: a bibliographic review. The best scientific database to do that is Medline. You can reach it at: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/PubMed/
There you will find a field in which you should write key words of what you are looking for, for example, "short term memory AND students AND fatigue AND workload". The database will return you either titles only or titles and abstracts; you can select some of them and ask for the full text either in the library or in the Internet. With the full text in hands, you will have a good support for writing your project.

These are only some steps of the project. In order for you both writing and developing a project, you should know several rules and techniques. You can find some information on that at:

How to do a Science Project
http://www.naplesfl.net/~science/sciprojinfo.htm

The Science Fair Project
http://www.scifair.com/project.htm
 

Good luck

Silvia Cardoso
  Volta