The Reading Enhancing Institute (REI), a center specializing in training those who will take certain standard tests (e.g., GRE), claims that their reading-skill training programs significantly contribute to the increase of the trainees’ test performance in standard reading test. You are hired as a research/data analysis consultant to evaluate the effectiveness of the program. One of your teammates observed that the effectiveness of the training programs on standard reading test 2 performance may be related to the content of the reading materials. His observation is based on his interview with his friends who had taken the training programs at REI. One of his friends, a psychology major, praised the training program, and said, “The program really helps him learn to focus on the theme of the materials”. While Kelly, a physics major student, commented that the program didn’t help at all. Your team designed a study to test whether the claim of REI is true. The study is a 3x3 experimental design. 45 senior students were randomly sampled from the class of 2004 in River University and were randomly assigned to one of the three training programs at REI: one control group where participants received no specific reading skill training and two different reading skill training groups – reading skill I and reading skill II. After receiving the training programs, the participants in each group were randomly assigned to take one of the three reading tests: the reading materials in the first test are related to natural sciences, those in the second test are related to social sciences, and those in the third are related to literature.

 

Table 1 presents the test scores.

3 Your task in this part  is to analyze the data (Table 1) to answer the questions:

RQ1: Do the different training programs (including the control group) make differences in reading test scores?

RQ2: Do the effects of the training programs in reading test scores differ depending upon the contents of the reading materials?

[Hint: when the interaction effect is significant, one should be cautious when interpreting the main effect. That is, any interpretation of the effects of one factor has to take into consideration how they are influenced by the other factor]

Please address the following issues/questions in your paper (not necessarily in the same order):

1. Begin with a short introduction of the study that sets the stage for your analysis;

2. Generate and present descriptive statistics relevant to this study and speculate what the descriptive statistics indicate (e.g., do you think there are any differences in the reading test scores from group to group? Why do you think so?);

3. Make sure to check the assumptions related your analysis and discuss whether any of the assumptions was violated and the possible consequence(s);

4. Specify the appropriate statistical hypotheses. Present your results in a summary twoway ANOVA table (in APA style).

5. Discuss your findings related to the two questions. What conclusion(s) can you draw from this study? What is the evidence for your conclusions?

6. Plot the means for the two-way ANOVA in a way to support your conclusion(s). Include a paragraph in which you present your conclusion(s) using the plot you generate.

7. Conduct post-hoc analyses if required.

Table 1. The Individual Test Score by Training Programs and Reading Materials Test reading materials Natural sciences Social sciences Literature Training programs control group reading-skill I reading-skill II 35 21 33 18 24 10 29 30 42 45 36 25 27 44 32 29 28 47 48 42 21 30 26 34 21 40 27 31 35 26 27 36 48 45 20 34 39 52 36 41 45 52 53 49 64