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By Del Siegle, PHD Del - Siegle@Uconn - Edu: WWW - Delsiegle.Info
By Del Siegle, PHD Del - Siegle@Uconn - Edu: WWW - Delsiegle.Info
del.siegle@uconn.edu
www.delsiegle.info
(This presentation may be used for instructional purposes)
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Spelling Test Scores
A t test allows us to compare the means of two groups and
determine how likely the difference between the two means
occurred by chance when there was no difference in population
from which the sample was drawn.
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All other factors being equal, large differences
between means are less likely to occur by chance
than small differences.
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The size of the standard deviation also influences the
outcome of a t test.
Given the same difference in means, groups with
smaller standard deviations are more likely to report a
significant difference than groups with larger
standard deviations.
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From a practical standpoint, we can see that smaller
standard deviations produce less overlap between the
groups than larger standard deviations. Less overlap
would indicate that the groups are more different from
each other.
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The size of our sample is also important. The
more subjects that are involved in a study,
the more confident we can be that the differences we
find between our groups did not occur by chance.
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Once we calculate the outcome of the t test (which
produces a t-value), we check that value (with the
appropriate degrees of freedom) on a critical value table
(a process similar to what we did for correlations) to
determine how likely the difference between the means
occurred by chance.
No
Yes
Equal Variance Are the variances of
Independent t test the two groups
(Pooled Variance different?
Independent t-test)
Yes
No (Significance Level
(Significance Level for Levene (or F-Max)
Equal Variance for Levene (or F-Max) is p <.05
Independent t test is p >.05
Unequal Variance