Pearson conducted a "social-psychological" experiment on thousands of U.S. college students without their knowledge, The Washington Post reports. The experiment, which included adding language into some of its software programs and then tracking how much the messages affected problem-solving, and its results were discussed at this month's 2018 convention of the American Educational Research Association in New York by Pearson researchers in a paper titled "Embedding Research-Inspired Innovations in EdTech: An RCT of Social-Psychological Interventions, at Scale." Nearly 9,300 students at 165 college and universities were part of the experiment during spring 2017 when they used MyLab Programming, a Pearson software product employed in conjunction with a computer programming textbook, according to the report. Pearson said in a statement that "Recent media coverage has mischaracterized a relatively minor product update by extracting technical language from the research that, when taken out of context, and paired with words like 'experiment,' conveys a malicious intent." Pearson is down 1.7% to $10.92 in morning trading. Reference Link
