Examining experimental design
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Ideas to create an experiment for the following scenario are generated: Your company has created a new reading program to be used in elementary schools. Design a way of testing this new program. You have access to two clasrooms: describe the hypothesis, participants, experimental group, control group, independent variable and how you can make the two groups equivalent at the start of the experiment. Also tell why correlations and case studies would not be useful for this type of experiment.
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Solution Summary
This posting firstly explains the principles behind experimental design. It then links it to the case listed in the question: to test the effectiveness of a new reading program for elementary students.
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Hello, I will be glad to help you.
Let's first look at experimental design, and then I will go into detail.
The key element of an experiment is that you randomly assign participants to participate in a study. You might have two groups: one group will get some type of treatment, and the other group will receive nothing. Then the behavior of both groups will be tested to see if the treatment has any effect on behavior.
Hypothesis
In research study, we want to have a clear direction on what we are studying. Essentially, we want to see if the new reading program has any effect on the ability of the children to read.
To conduct research, we need to have two groups:
The experimental (treatment) group - this is the group of people who will receive treatment - in other words, they would receive the reading program.
Now, if we just look at the results from the experimental group, we would have nothing to compare them to. This is where a second group comes into play.
The second group is called the control group. This group is used as a 'baseline' - they would not receive the ...
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