A researcher has studied subjects' ability to learn to translate words into Morse code. He has experimented with two treatment conditions: in one condition, the subjects are given massed practice; they spend 6 full hours on the task. In the other condition, subjects are given distributed practice; they also spend 6 hours, but their practice is spread over four days, practicing 2 hours at a time. After the practice, all subjects are given a test message to encode; the dependent variable is the number of errors made. The researcher has matched the subjects on intelligence. The results are in the following table. Decide which statistical test would be appropriate, carry out the test, and evaluate the outcome. Assume a significance level of .05 and that the direction of the outcome has not been predicted. What are we dealing with here? t test....what must you do with the null hypothesis guys (accept or reject)?
Massed Practice Distributed Practice
S1 6 S1 5
S2 4 S2 3
S3 3 S3 2
S4 5 S4 2
S5 2 S5 3