case0402: Cognitive Load

Description Usage Format Source References Examples

Description

Educational researchers randomly assigned 28 ninth-year students in Australia to receive coordinate geometry training in one of two ways: a conventional way and a modified way. After the training, the students were asked to solve a coordinate geometry problem. The time to complete the problem was recorded, but five students in the “conventional” group did not complete the solution in the five minute alloted time.

Usage

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Format

A data frame with 28 observations on the following 3 variables.

Time

the time (in seconds) that the student worked on the problem

Treatment

factor variable with two levels—"Modified" and "Conventional"

Censored

1 if the individual did not complete the problem in 5 minutes, 0 if they did

Source

Ramsey, F.L. and Schafer, D.W. (2013). The Statistical Sleuth: A Course in Methods of Data Analysis (3rd ed), Cengage Learning.

References

Sweller, J., Chandler, P., Tierney, P. and Cooper, M. (1990). Cognitive Load as a Factor in the Structuring of Technical Material, Journal of Experimental Psychology General 119(2): 176–192.

Examples

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str(case0402) # level 1 of Treatment is "Conventional" (1st alphabetically)
attach(case0402)  

boxplot(Time ~ Treatment) 
median(Time[Treatment=="Conventional"])-median(Time[Treatment=="Modified"])  
  
wilcox.test(Time ~ Treatment, exact=FALSE, correct=TRUE, 
  alternative="greater")  # Rank-sum test; alternative: group 1 is greater
wilcox.test(Time ~ Treatment, exact=FALSE, correct=TRUE, 
  alternative="two.sided", conf.int=TRUE)  # Use 2-sided to get confidence int.  
        
## DOT PLOTS FOR PRESENTATION 
xTreatment    <- ifelse(Treatment=="Conventional",1,2) # Make numerical values  
myPointCode   <- ifelse(Censored==0,21,24)  
plot(Time ~ jitter(xTreatment,.2),   # Jitter the 1's and 2's for visibility
     ylab="Completion Time (Sec.)",  xlab="Training Method (jittered)",
     main="Test Completion Times from Cognitive Load Experiment",
     axes=FALSE, pch=myPointCode, bg="green", cex=2, xlim=c(.5,2.5) )  
axis(2) # Draw y-axis as usual
axis(1, tick=FALSE,  at=c(1,2),  # Draw x-axis without ticks
  labels=c("Conventional (n=14 Students)","Modified (n=14 Students)") )  
legend(1.5,300, legend=c("Did not Complete in 300 sec","Completed in 300 sec."),
       pch=c(24,21), pt.cex=2, pt.bg="green")  
  
detach(case0402) 

Example output

'data.frame':	28 obs. of  3 variables:
 $ Time     : int  68 70 73 75 77 80 80 132 148 155 ...
 $ Treatment: Factor w/ 2 levels "Conventional",..: 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 ...
 $ Censored : int  0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 ...
[1] 129

	Wilcoxon rank sum test with continuity correction

data:  Time by Treatment
W = 164, p-value = 0.001271
alternative hypothesis: true location shift is greater than 0


	Wilcoxon rank sum test with continuity correction

data:  Time by Treatment
W = 164, p-value = 0.002542
alternative hypothesis: true location shift is not equal to 0
95 percent confidence interval:
  57.00007 159.99998
sample estimates:
difference in location 
                    94 

Sleuth3 documentation built on May 2, 2019, 6:41 a.m.