question 1

In a large high school, a mathematics teacher teaching in the honors program has three classes of calculus. The teacher has been using a traditional calculus text for three years, but two textbook publishers have new calculus texts available. The teacher decides to use a different text with each of the three classes. The students are pretested on a math achievement test early in the fall and the three classes are given a common final exam at the end of the semester. The purpose of the study is to determine whether or not the textbooks have differing effects upon learning calculus. Although the math achievement pretest is not likely to contain many if any calculus problems, the scores on the pretest are useful for: 1. clueing the students to the calculus content. 2. separating the students by ability. 3. orienting the students to the textbooks. 4. checking on the pre-experimental equivalence of the groups