http://www.ck12.org Chapter 6. Planning and Conducting an Experiment or Study
Use your calculator to randomly assign each student to a treatment. Explain how you made your assignments.
(c) Identify any potential lurking variables in this experiment.
(d) Explain how you could redesign this experiment as a repeated measures design?
- A recent British study was attempting to show that a high fat diet was effective in treating epilepsy in children.
According to the New York Times, this involved, "...145 children ages 2 to 16 who had never tried the diet,
who were having at least seven seizures a week and who had failed to respond to at least two anticonvulsant
drugs."^1
a. What is the population in this example?
b. One group began the diet right away, another group waited three months to start it. In the first group,
38% of the children experienced a 50% reduction in seizure rates, and in the second group, only 6 percent
saw a similar reduction. What information would you need to be able to conclude that this was a valid
experiment?
c. Identify the treatment and control groups in this experiment.
d. What conclusion could you make from the reported results of this experiment. - Researchers want to know how chemically fertilized and treated grass compares to grass using only organic
fertilizer. They also believe that the height at which the grass is cut will affect the growth of the lawn. To test
this, grass will be cut at three different heights, 1 inch, 2 inches, and 4 inches. A lawn area of existing healthy
grass will be divided up into plots for the experiment. Assume that the soil, sun, and drainage for the test
areas is uniform. Explain how you would implement a randomized block design to test the different effects of
fertilizer and grass height. Draw a diagram that shows the plots and the assigned treatments.
Review Answers
- The population is all fruit flies of this species. The treatment is breeding for intelligence. The other
treatment is really a control group. The second group of flies were not bred for any special quality.
- The population is all fruit flies of this species. The treatment is breeding for intelligence. The other
- By the strict definition, this is an observational study as the subjects (fruit flies) are not randomly assigned
to the treatment. A group of fruit flies was selectively bred for intelligence. - Because the treatments were not randomly assigned the results are susceptible to lurking variables. It is
possible that some other trait not observed in the population of intelligent fruit flies led to their lower
survival rate. It is also questionable to generalize the behavior of fruit flies to the larger population of all
animals. We have no guarantee that other animals will not behave differently than fruit flies. Without
reading the study completely, it is difficult to determine how many of these concerns were addressed by
the scientists performing the study. You can read more at:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/06/science/06dumb.html?ref=science - This is a repeated measures design. Each student becomes their own matched pair as they are sampling
both colas. - Students may have a preconceived idea of which cola they prefer for many possible reasons. You could
have the colas already poured into identical unmarked cups, or hide the label of the bottle. This would
be an example of a blind experiment. - It is possible that the taste of the first cola might affect the taste of the second. In general, the order
in which they taste the colas could affect their perception in a number of ways. To control for this, we
could randomly assign the order in which the colas are sampled. Assign one of the colas to be 1 and the
other to be 2, then use your calculator to choose 1 or 2 randomly for each subject. If the student is given
the two cups and given the option of choosing which one to drink first, we could randomly assign the
position of each cup (right or left).