Thursday, September 19, 2013

Independent and Dependent Variables

1.  A group of college students were given a short course in speed-reading. The instructor was curious if a monetary incentive would influence performance on a reading test taken at the end of the course.  Half the students were offered $5 for obtaining a certain level of performance on the test, the other half were not offered money. Based on the situation presented, identify the:

Independent variable:
Dependent variable:
Experimental group:
Control group:


2.  A social psychologist thinks that people are more likely to conform to a large crowd than to a single person.  To test this hypothesis, the social psychologist had either one person or five persons stand on a busy walking path on campus and look up.  The psychologist stood nearby and counted the number of people passing by who also looked up.

Independent variable:
Dependent variable:
Experimental group:
Control group:



3.  To test a new voice feature in a cockpit design a flight simulator was used.  The simulator was programmed to give visual readings of flight information, or to give visual and auditory (voice) readings of flight information.  All test pilots were put through a simulated emergency landing procedure, but were randomly assigned to the visual, or visual and auditory conditions.  Flight experts rated each pilot’s performance in the simulator on a scale of 1 (very poor) to 10 (excellent).

 Independent variable:
Dependent variable:
Experimental group:
Control group:

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