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EXAMPLE OF PEARSON’S CORRELATION BY USING SOCSSTATISTICS

1. You would like to check whether your students’ vocabulary mastery (x) correlates with their reading
comprehension (y). You administer two tests to get the data/ scores for these two variables.

Student Vocabulary Reading

# Mastery (x) Comprehension
(y)
1 83.00 74.50
2 73.00 63.50
3 66.00 61.50
4 67.00 61.50
5 71.00 66.50
6 75.50 64.50
7 62.50 61.50
8 63.50 61.50
9 63.50 61.50
10 72.00 65.50
11 63.50 61.50
12 69.50 65.50
13 73.50 67.50
14 69.50 63.50
15 70.50 64.50
16 70.50 67.50
17 69.00 62.50
18 63.50 61.50
19 69.50 66.50
20 66.50 61.50
21 65.50 62.50
22 69.50 64.50
23 65.50 61.50
24 64.50 61.50
25 72.00 68.00
26 68.00 63.50
27 64.50 68.00
28 69.50 65.50
29 64.50 63.50
30 73.50 61.50
N=30 Mean: 68.65 Mean: 64.13

2. Go to https://www.socscistatistics.com/tests/pearson/default.aspx

3. Click ‘’take me to the calculator’’ button

4. Enter your scores into the text boxes (x values and y values)

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5. Click ‘’Calculate R’’.

6. Check the results

7. How to interpret the results?

First, take a look at the box on the bottom left. The box summarizes the calculation the program has
made for the x values, y values and most importantly your Pearson’s r coefficient.

Socsstatistics also calculates your coefficient of determination, as you can see in the final result display,
you just need to convert the value into a percentage format (%).

Your Pearson’s r coefficient value is 0.727. Based on this coefficient value, we can conclude that there is
a positive correlation between students’ vocabulary mastery and their reading comprehension.
Socsstatistics has helped provide this result interpretation by stating that this value indicates “a
moderate positive correlation, which means there is a tendency for high x variable scores to go with
high y variable scores (and vice versa)”. Furthermore, the coefficient of determination is 0.5285.

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Therefore, we can say that the degree of correlation between students’ vocabulary and reading
comprehension scores is about 52.85 %.