Continue to use this scenario first given in Question 3 to answer Questions 4 – 6.
A school psychologist wants to test the effectiveness of a new method for teaching reading. She recruits 80 first-grade students in District Code 75104 and randomly divides them into two groups. Group 1 is taught by means of the new method, while Group 2 is taught by the traditional method. The same teacher is assigned to teach both groups. At the end of the year, an achievement test is administered and the results are compared.
question 4
What are some advantages of using the completely randomized block design for the education researcher in the scenario given in Question 3?
question 5
Again, referring to the scenario given in Question 3, would you consider this experiment to be well-designed?
question 6
Would you trust the results from the conclusions of this experiment or would you be skeptical?
Guidance
[Wrap-up: The key components of a well-designed experiment include treatment, factor of interest (also known as the explanatory variable or independent variable), response variable (also known as the dependent variable), nuisance factors, random assignment, and replication.
The completely randomized block design is an additional method we can use to control for a known difference that affects the response factor.
The basic principles of a completely randomized block design are blocking and randomization.
Blocking helps to minimize the effects of nuisance factors. Randomization is used to assign subjects within the blocks to the treatment groups, which helps ensure that the groups have similar distributions of factors other than the factor of interest.
We can trust the conclusions of a well-designed experiment. The results of a well-designed and implemented study are meaningful. ]
