Suppose you were interested in studying how the color of a room might affect student performance on exams. Describe the experiment you would design to investigate this, and be sure to indicate what the independent and dependent variables are in the study you chose, and how you might deal with the problem of confounding variables

Question

What will be an ideal response?

Answer 1

ANSWER:
?Answers will vary. To understand the effect of room color on student test performance, I would recruit a group of students from a large class to take their midterm exam in different rooms in smaller groups. If the class originally had about 50 students, I would assign groups of 25 students to take their exams in rooms that were either a warm (red) or cool (blue) color. I would then compare the performance of these two groups (warm versus cool room color) on the exam scores. The independent variable in this experiment is the color of the room in which the exam takes place (red or blue). The dependent variable in this experiment is the exam score. Of course, it is possible that students in the “warm” room might naturally be better test takers or students than those in the “cool” room—or vice versa, which would present another explanation for any results. To minimize the effect of such confounding variables I would randomly assign students to conditions so that students’ preferences, skills, and so forth would (hopefully) be evenly distributed across the two groups.