Question

3. We would like to know whether, on average, students learn better in a self-paced or in an instructor-paced computer learning environment. We randomly assigned 40 BL131 students to self-paced sessions and a different 40 students to an instructor-paced sessions for one unit and recorded the exam scores for that unit. The two-sided p-value for the comparison was 0.01. alpha = 0.05.

A) State your conclusion in context and say why you reached that conclusion.

We would like to know whether students learn better in a self-paced- or in an instructor-paced computer learning environment. We randomly assigned 40 BL131 students to self-paced sessions and a different 40 students to an instructor-paced sessions. Here are all the pieces of information from the analysis:

	self-paced		instructor-paced
x-bar		73.75	78.60
s		8.10	7.90
n		40.00	40.00
xbar1-xbar2			4.85
stderr of (xbar1-xbar2)			1.80
t			2.70
p-value			0.01
critical t			1.96
critical (xbar1-xbar2)			3.53
Confidence Interval for difference in means
hi	8.4
lo	1.3

5. State the null and alternative hypothesis for this test.

6. Our test statistic is (xbar1-xbar2) but to actually get the critical values and p-values we use a t-ratio. What, in plain English, is the t-ratio telling us specifically? (And don’t say ‘whether to reject Ho)

Answer 1