Assessment of a foreign-language institute. The National Endowment for the Humanities sponsors summer institutes to improve the skills of high school teachers of foreign languages. One such institute hosted 20 French teachers for 4 weeks. At the beginning of the period, the teachers were given the Modern Language Association's listening test of understanding of spoken French. After 4 weeks of immersion in French in and out of class, the listening test was given again. (The actual French spoken in the two tests was different, so that simply taking the first test should not improve the score on the second test.) The maximum possible score on the test is 36.15 Here are the data:
The "Gain" column is the difference between the posttest score and pretest score and represents the improvement for each teacher.
(a) State appropriate null and alternative hypotheses for examining the question of whether or not the course improves French spoken-language skills.
(b) Describe the gain data. Use numerical and graphical summaries.
(c) Perform the significance test. Give the test statistic, the degrees of freedom, and the P-value. Summarize your conclusion.
(d) Give a 95% confidence interval for the mean improvement.