Citation

This paper reviews 96 undergraduate student projects supervised by Koestler Parapsychology Unit staff. Of these projects, 41.7% were unrelated either to psi or to paranormal experiences and beliefs; 18.8% were related to paranormal experiences and beliefs but contained no psi task. The paper focuses on the remaining 38 projects (39.6%) that included a psi task. Of these projects, 27 predicted overall significant performance on a psi task and 8 (29.6%) found the predicted results. Four small clusters of projects that used similar psi tasks were identified. The PK-RNG and EDA presentiment studies showed little consistency of psi task performance, and the majority (8 out of 9) obtained nonsignificant psi results. In contrast, significant results and relatively consistent effect sizes were found in 3 of the 5 ganzfeld studies, specifically those with participants who were “creative,” extravert, or who had practiced a mental discipline. None of the EDA-staring studies was statistically significant: however all 3 found effects in the predicted direction and of a reasonable magnitude (r ~ 0.15). These results are discussed in terms of what can be learned from student projects.