A Common Practice of Teachers Is to Have Students Exchange

Essay

A common practice of teachers is to have students exchange their quizzes and grade each others. In addition to decreasing the teacher's work load, the reduced time between quiz and feedback is thought to be a plus for learning. Your U.S. History teacher, aware of your statistical prowess, has asked you to design an experiment to test this theory. You have decided to use the mid-term exam (not graded by students) as your response measure. Your history teacher has three classes, one early in the morning, one at noon, and one late in the afternoon. Each class contains 30 students. (a) Describe the treatments you will use in your experiment (b) One possible confounding variable is the time of day, since students may be more alert at certain times of the day than at other times. Describe a method would you use to control this variable? (Unfortunately you cannot change the student schedules!) (c) Do you feel the results of your experiment could be generalized to your statistics class? Why or why not?