Dr. Chen, an Asian man, was interested in examining how race of a teacher influe

Question

Dr. Chen, an Asian man, was interested in examining how race of a teacher influences test performance of students. For an upcoming exam, he randomly selected half of his class to take the exam with him, and half of his class to take the exam with his colleague, Dr. Healey, a Caucasian woman. After students took the exam, he compared their exam scores and found that his group scored significantly higher on the exam than Dr. Healey’s group, and concluded that race of teacher does indeed make a difference.

Identify the independent variable(s).

Identify the dependent variable(s).

Identify any extraneous/confounding variable(s).

Given the confounding variable(s) you identified in #3, propose a method to "unconfound" the experiment (i.e., how would you fix the study?).

Explanation / Answer

The independent variable; which we change is the race of the instructor by changing the instructor. The dependent variable; which we record is the performance of the class. The extraneous/confounding variable that we may encounter is any other factor such as the age, gender and ethnicity of the students. A method to "unconfound" the experiment would include steps in making the students alike such as taking students of same age group, gender and ethnicity and having the random assignment of students and instructors in the experiment.

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