In March, 2024, Jonathan Haidt's provocative book,The Anxious Generation, became an instant bestseller. One of Haidt's central claims in the book is that smartphone use is a driver of the increased anxiety and mental health concerns among teens and young adults (especially noticeable in "Gen Z"). As a result, he recommends banning smartphones (and strictly enforcing these bans) in schools, suggesting that this will cut back on distractions in school, promote more in-person interactions among students, and help to limit their compulsive use of social media.

Haidt cites a number of studies showing evidence for these claims. For now, let's just focus on the effect of banning smartphones in school on learning. Most studies measure "learning" through some type of test score. Imagine that one study simply gathered test score data for each student each student in a state, say Pennsylvania. The researchers then compared the average test score of those students attending schools that banned smartphone usevs. those students attending schools without these bans. Answer the following questions:

1. What hypothesis testing procedure would you use based on these data to determine whether the average test scores were higher for students with smartphone bans compared to those with no smartphone ban? Focus only on the ones covered in textbook/videos for this chapter.
2. Why might this evidence alonenotconvince you that smartphone bans do/do not have a positive average effect on learning (or at least, on test scores)?
3. Based on your answer to part 2, if you were in charge of the study, how would you change it to make the results more conclusive, (i.e., to reduce possible alternative explanations or confounding variables)? Would you need to change the hypothesis testing procedure at all to account for the change(s) you chose? Explain.