Classroom experiments are not considered “research” in a specific technical sense, and thus do not need to be reviewed by the university’s Institutional Review Board (see this statement). Nonetheless, we want to do our research in an ethical manner, and the keystone of ethical research with human subjects is informed consent.

Informed. Research participants must know what they are going to be doing when they give consent. They do not need to know the research question – in fact, generally speaking you may prefer that they don’t. But they do need to know what they are going to be doing (reading sentences, being recorded, etc). They especially need to be informed if there is any risk in an experiment – in linguistics research, there typically is little to none. They also need to be informed about what you are going to do with the data, and especially how you are going to protect their confidentiality. Finally, they need to know if there are any potential benefits to them or to others that will come from participating in this research.

Consent. Research participants must give explicit consent before they are involved in an experiment, and must be free to stop the experiment at any time. They must also not be coerced in any way to participate.

When we involve people outside of the classroom in our research, we will always get informed consent.