An educational psychologist is interested in how students'...

An educational psychologist is interested in how students' moods vary across a given school day. The researcher is interested in identifying stable mood patterns among middle school students, as such patterns may reveal the "best" or "worst" time for teaching and learning particular academic topics. Twenty students complete a mood scale at six intervals during a typical day (i.e., about every 2 hours). The measures are administered at home (when they wake up and just before bed), as well as in school. What type of analysis should the educational psychologist use to analyze the data from the mood scales? Why? Use the decision trees that open this chapter to answer and to guide your thinking about these questions.

Key Concepts

Repeated Measures Design

A repeated measures design involves taking multiple observations from the same subjects over time or under different conditions. This design allows researchers to examine changes within individuals and control for individual differences, which is essential when measuring a variable like mood at several points throughout the day.

Within-Subjects Analysis

Within-subjects analysis refers to statistical methods that account for the fact that repeated observations are collected from the same individuals. Techniques such as repeated measures ANOVA or multilevel modeling are used to test for systematic changes over time while considering the correlation among measurements made on the same subject.

Longitudinal Data Analysis

Longitudinal data analysis involves techniques that are specially designed to handle data collected from the same subjects over multiple time points. This approach is crucial when the aim is to identify stable patterns or trajectories in an outcome (like mood) across time, as it acknowledges both the individual’s baseline level and the pattern of change.

Transcript

00:01 In this example, we are looking at randomized experiments, and there's really two types of experiments, and that's one of the things we're going to look at with this particular example, where we're taking students and splitting them into two groups and being taught by two different methods, which is a very common practice in educational research.

00:23 So the first thing we're asked is what is the response variable in this experiment? so when you're looking at the explanatory and the response variable, the explanatory variable is the thing that's going to do the explaining for the outcomes.

00:36 The response variable is the thing that you hope responds to the different treatments differently.

00:41 So in this case, the response variable is the achievement scores.

00:50 The second thing we're looking at is what are some of the factors in the study.

00:56 So some different factors of our individuals might be different sources.

01:01 Student levels some students might achieve at a higher level than others some may achieve lower some other things are the teaching method which we are definitely controlling in this and we are actually manipulating this variable this is the one variable that we are manipulating because we are assigning that particular treatment to each individual.

01:38 Some other things could be home lives.

01:43 Our students going to complete their homework or not.

01:46 And we are actually controlling these other two variables by our randomization process.

01:53 By randomizing them into two groups, we are hopefully balancing out those two variables along with other outside factors equally.

02:04 One thing that could also affect student achievement scores is the teacher but in this case we are the teacher is teaching both sections so the teacher is not going to play an impact on this because that particular factor is equal between the two groups but it could play a part if there were two different teachers that were not trained exactly the same what are the treatments the two treatments are method one which is the old method that's your control group and then method two which is the new new method of teaching okay well i guess the problem actually splits it up differently so group one is the new teaching method and method two is our traditional teaching so there are two treatments in total...

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