The National Endowment for the Humanities sponsors summer in

The National Endowment for the Humanities sponsors summer institutes to improve the skills of high school teachers of foreign languages. One such institute designed a summer program for French language teachers and they wanted to test the success of the program before they implemented it in their permanent summer schedules. To determine the success of the program, they randomly divided 40 French teachers into two groups of 20. One group completed the new program in 4 weeks and the second group completed the existing old program during this time. At the end of the 4 weeks, the teachers in both programs were given the listening test of Modern Language Association for the understanding of spoken French. The test results are given in the following table. The maximum possible score on the test is 36.

Scores of the teachers from old program

Scores of the teachers from new program

19

27

28

26

31

25

24

19

23

22

28

35

32

19

30

27

25

31

19

34

20

28

25

28

23

19

32

36

30

23

29

27

27

33

21

32

24

29

24

26

Are these dependent or independent samples? Explain your answer.

Solution

These are independent samples. Because the teachers are independent from each other. There are 2 groups of teachers and both groups have training in dufferent way without interfering in other group. So these samples are independent.