Miguel Angel Llovera Da Corte REMS 5953 Online Fall 2012 Homework #5: Correlation and Regression

PART I: CORRELATION (CHAPTER 15) Step 1: Population 1: Students like those that have been previously analyzed Population 2: Students for whom there is no correlation between the scores of the Verbal and Math portion of the ACT test. This is a distribution of all possible correlations between the scores of the Verbal and Math portion of the ACT test when 40 students are considered. Assumptions: 1. We do not know how the data were selected, so we should generalize with caution. 2. We do not know if the underlying population distributions for Verbal and Math ACT scores are normally distributed. However, there are more than 30 scores. 3. We can see from the scatterplot that the data are very variable. Step 2: Null hypothesis: there is no correlation between the scores of the Verbal and Math portion of the ACT test Ho: = 0 Research Hypothesis: there is a correlation between the scores of the Verbal and Math portion of the ACT test H1: 0 Step 3: The comparison distribution is an r distribution with degrees of freedom calculated as follows:

Step 4: The critical values for an r distribution with 38 degrees of freedom for a two-tailed test with a p level of 0.05 are -0.304 and 0.304. Step 5:

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Step 6: The test statistic, r=0.586, is larger in magnitude than the critical value of 0.304. We can reject the null hypothesis and conclude that a strong positive correlation exists between the scores of the Verbal and Math portion of the ACT test completed by a group of students.

PART II: REGRESSION (CHAPTER 16) REGRESSION EQUATION: = a + b(X) = 267.10 + .57(X) a) b = .57 This is the amount that Math scores are predicted to increase for an increase of 1 in Verbal scores. a = 267.10 This is the predicted value for Math scores when Verbal scores are equal to 0. b) We have reduced 0.344, or 34.4% of the original error by using the regression equation versus using the mean to predict Y. c) = 267.10 + .57(X) = 267.10 + .57(460) = 267.10 + 262.2 = 529 d) The standardized regression coefficient tells us the predicted change in the dependent variable in terms of standard deviation for every increase of 1 standard deviation in the independent variable. This coefficient is not significantly different from zero. However, it is very similar to the Pearson correlation coefficient.