Hi guys,
I just did the Engage Education Unit 3 practice exam & had a qn:
This was the passage:
Mrs Clarke is a unit 3/4 psychology teacher who is conducting an experiment on the effects of distraction on memory and learning. She uses forty year 12 psychology students as her participants and encourages them to take part in her experiment by offering extra revision classes only to participating students before their upcoming SAC. She randomly assigns the participants to either one of two groups before commencing the experiment. She ensures an equal number of males and females are in each group. Each group then undergoes two tasks; one in which they learn a list of ten nonsense syllables in a silent room and another task in which they learn a list of ten nonsense syllables in a noisy room. Mrs Clarke is absent on the day the experiment is conducted and so she asks Mr Smith, the year 12 maths teacher, to instruct the students and collect the data. Mrs Smith then collates it and interprets the results. Mr Smith does not understand the purpose of the experiment, but is able to simply read Mrs Clarke’s set of instructions to each group.
And these were the questions:
Question 39
Which of the following experimental designs best describes the design that Mrs Clarke uses?
A. Independent groups design
B. Repeated measures design
C. Matched participant design
D. Random allocation design
For this qn, I put A because the 40 students were split into two groups. Even though within each group they did the same tasks, the groups were still split so wouldn't it be A? The answer said B, but that wouldn't make sense because why would you need to split the 40 students into two groups anyway then?
Question 40
Which of the following is least likely to be a confounding variable in Mrs Clarke’s experiment?
A. Sample bias
B. Oder effects
C. Experimenter effect
D. Use of non-standardised instructions and procedures
I put A). The answer said C) however because Mrs. Smith is collating and interpreting her data, wouldn't she effect the results since she is not Mrs Clarke, and hence won't know the purpose or nature of the experiment, and hence wouldn't know what's a good result or what's not etc....