Statistical Analysis for Education and Psychology Researchers

Examining Data Distributions

Example 5.6: Distributions of Three Reading Scores

A PhD student collected data on a number of reading measures including two syntactic
awareness measures: a measure of syntactic awareness in a difficult reading passage; a
measure of syntactic awareness in an easy reading passage, and as a third variable a
measure of pupils’ vocabulary. Both syntactic awareness variables were measured as
percentage correct scores and the vocabulary score was a raw score with maximum
possible score of 25. The data distributions and moments of all three variables are shown
in Figures 5.9, 5.10 and 5.11. Non-relevant sections of SAS output have been deleted for
clarity of presentation.

Choosing a statistical test 143