2. A teacher wants to investigate whether there is a difference between male and female students in the amount of time they spend studying for statistics. The table below shows the amount of time students spend studying statistics each week. The amounts of time spent studying are normally distributed.
Male Female
27 25
25 29
19 18
10 23
16 20
17 15
15 19
a. What statistical test should be used to analyze the data?
b. Is this a one- or two tailed test?
c. Identify H0 and Ha for this study.
d. Conduct the appropriate analysis. Should H0 be rejected?
Try an independent groups t-test. This will be a two-tailed test because the problem is just asking if there is a difference, which could be in either direction.
Ho: µ1 = µ2 -->population means are equal
Ha: µ1 does not equal µ2 -->population means are not equal
I hope this will help get you started.
a. The appropriate statistical test to analyze the data would be an independent samples t-test. This test compares the means of two independent groups to determine if there is a significant difference between them.
b. This is a two-tailed test. We are testing whether there is a difference between male and female students in the amount of time they spend studying statistics. We want to see if there is a significant difference in either direction.
c. H0 (null hypothesis): There is no difference between male and female students in the amount of time they spend studying statistics.
Ha (alternative hypothesis): There is a difference between male and female students in the amount of time they spend studying statistics.
d. To conduct the independent samples t-test, you would calculate the mean and standard deviation for each group (male and female), calculate the t-statistic, and compare it to the critical value from the t-distribution at the desired significance level (e.g., alpha = 0.05). If the calculated t-value is greater than the critical value, you would reject the null hypothesis (H0) and conclude that there is a significant difference between male and female students in the amount of time spent studying statistics.