Open the data set. Can you use a test to see whether girls do better than boys at maths?
To look at this we would use maths grades as our dependent variable, and gender as our
independent variable. Maths grades is continuous, and gender is nominal, so we can use
a T-test to see whether there is a significant difference between boys and girls in maths
grades. The output from the independent T-test should look something like this:
 figure 1.png)
 figure 2.png)
In the first box we can see that the mean grade for boys is 75.5, and for girls 76.5. So the girls’ mean is somewhat higher. Is this difference significant though? To answer that
question we need to look at the second output box. There we first need to look at Levene’s test of Equality of variance. We can see that the significance of Levene’s F-test is .166.
This is larger than .05, so the difference in variance between boys and girls is not significant. That means that for the T-test we can assume that variances are equal, and look in the first row. We can see there that our significance level for the T-test is .368. This is more than .05, so the small difference we found between boys and girls in mean maths score is not significant. This means that we can’t be sure that the small difference
in this sample is not a coincidence. So we can’t say there is likely to be a difference between boys and girls in maths grades in the population.
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