A public school teacher is completing a research project for her master’s thesis that involves assessing the benefits of using smart boards in the classrooms. She believes smart boards will facilitate learning and lead to higher grades. In order to support her research project, her principal gives her permission to determine who will receive a new smart board and who will stay on a waiting list. She randomly determines which classes will receive smart boards and then compares the average scores of students in each group on a standardized test appropriate for their respective grade level. questions
1. What is her independent variable in this study?
2. What is her dependent variable?
3. What is her hypothesis
4. Who is in her experimental group? Students Her control group?
5. In her analysis, she also checked to see if there were significant differences in the performance of students in each of the different grade levels. If students were all performing at their best, their averages on the grade-specific tests should all be the same. However, the variable of ‘grade level’ is not a true independent variable in this analysis. Why not?