1-What is internal validity?

2-What is external validity?

3-What is a confound?

4- On the most recent exam in your biology class, every student made an A. The professor claims that he must be an excellent teacher for all of his students to have done so well. Given the confounds we've discussed, what is an alternative explanation for this result?

5- You conduct an experiment to determine whether listening to music affects math test scores. It is a 1 x 3 ANOVA: the three types of music played during the test are pop, hip hop, and classical. You bring all of the participants in the first group into a room and play pop during the test; then you do the same thing with the participants for the second group in the hip hop condition, and again for the classical music condition. What, if anything, is the problem here?

6- You want to conduct an experiment that measures people's political attitudes. You give a ten-item questionnaire to participants to determine whether they are conservative (low scores on the questionnaire) or liberal (high scores on the questionnaire). You find that almost all of your participants are scoring high. What is the problem in this case?

7- You decide to study the effect of room temperature and background noise on attention. To measure attention, you have a computerized word judgment task that shows one word every three seconds. Participants must say whether the word starts with a vowel or a consonant. Because the words come so quickly, constant attention is required. You hypothesize that the more distracted people are, the more mistakes they will make in the word judgement task. You decide to run a 2 x 2 experiment. The first IV is room temperature: normal or very warm. The second IV is background noise: yes or no. You randomly assign people to conditions except for the control group - the group that gets the normal temperature room with no background noise. You figure that this condition is so boring that only your friends will take it seriously, so you put your friends into this condition. What, if anything, is the problem with this? If there is a problem, how do you solve it?

8- You run an experiment where you are measuring how tolerant people are of loud sounds. In one condition, you play sounds that are not very intense. In another condition, you play sounds that are VERY loud. You are finding that people in the very loud condition choose not to continue the experiment. Why is this a problem? How do you solve it?

9- What is an extraneous variable? Why is it a problem?

10-You are conducting an experiment and in your informed consent, you state that you are hoping to find that people who are more empathetic are more likely to help someone in need. What, if anything, is the problem with saying this?

11-What is the "college sophomore problem"? What are three responses to this criticism?

12-What does it mean to run a "blind" experiment?

13-What does it mean to "counterbalance"?

14-What four things can you do to make sure you have a good experiment?

15-What is a manipulation check? Why is it important?