Stats Hw Question

Question

The authors of the paper "Fudging the Numbers: Distributing Chocolate Influences Student Evaluations of an Undergraduate Course"† carried out a study to see if events unrelated to an undergraduate course could affect student evaluations. Students enrolled in statistics courses taught by the same instructor participated in the study. All students attended the same lectures and one of six discussion sections that met once a week. At the end of the course, the researchers chose three of the discussion sections to be the "chocolate group." Students in these three sections were offered chocolate prior to having them fill out course evaluations. Students in the other three sections were not offered chocolate. The researchers concluded that "Overall, students offered chocolate gave more positive evaluations than students not offered chocolate." Indicate whether the study is an observational study or an experiment. Give a brief explanation for your choice.

Answer 1

This would be classified as an experimental study. A key indication of why this is an experimental study is the scientists created a treatment and control group and they administered the treatment and examined the results themselves. An experiment follows procedures like testing a hypothesis in a randomized and controlled environment, minimizing external influences. Observational studies typically examine past events that occurred in uncontrolled environments. For example, comparing over the span of the 20th century a country's likeliness to go to war based upon if it is a democracy versus an autocracy. There are fewer collectible data points because there were a limited amount of armed conflicts and nations to study in the 20th century. There are also many factors to control for that could have sent the country into war besides its government structure. Experimental studies such as the chocolate study are efficient because you can design the experiment to have more subjects and to limit external influences.