An educational researcher conducts an experiment to see whet

An educational researcher conducts an experiment to see whether a. new reading scheme helps to improve the reading ability of primary school pupils. A group-comparative design is used. One group comprises a. class of 20 seven- and eight-year?old pupils from a school, who use the new reading scheme for a ten-week period. The second group comprises a different class of 20 seven- and eight-year-old pupils from the same school, who use the existing reading scheme for a. ten-week period. At the end of the ten-week period, all pupils take a. standard reading test that gives an overall score; the improvement in reading ability of each pupil is recorded. The resulting data. are to be analysed using a. hypothesis test. (a) What type of data are produced in this experiment? (b) From the hypothesis tests listed a.t the start of Subsection 4.4 of Unit 11, give the most appropriate test for analyzing these data., together with the reasons for your answer.

Solution

a) In the experiment the scores of the two groups of the students who use use different reading scheme are found. Hence the data obtained is a discrete data which is expected to be normally distributed

b) As in both the groups the group size is 20 each which is less than 30, so t- test will be appropriate for the testing hypothesis