Political science practice exercise C

Political science practice exercise C

Please see the attached file for instructions and let me know if you have any questions. If possible please assign the following writer:

Access this book and read these chapters:

Johnson: Chapter 6

Practice Exercise C Worksheet:

Experimental Design

Instructions: Answer each of the following four questions with complete, well-written sentences/paragraphs. Use as much space as you need (5 points each). You may write as many pages as you need to, but please no less than 2. Thanks !

1)            A public interest group has produced a fifteen-minute videotape designed to increase voting participation among young people aged eighteen to twenty-four but is not sure the tape will produce the desired effect. Sketch a classic experimental design to test whether the videotape is likely to increase voting turnout among eligible voters in the targeted age group.

2)            A state university is trying to improve efficiency by making sure that students who have signed up for a meeting with their academic advisor actually show up. Only 60 percent of the students arrive at their scheduled time. Two suggestions for increasing that percentage are to (1) e-mail each student a reminder of the meeting date and time the day before the meeting or (2) telephone the student with the reminder the evening before the scheduled meeting. Explain how to use a field experiment to assess the effect of each suggestion separately, as well as the effect of using both suggestions, compared to doing nothing at all.

3)            A college professor wants to determine if holding discussions in class, rather than lecturing all the time, improves student learning. He teaches two sections of an introductory course and decides, for a semester, to have one section engage in discussions twice a week while the other would have only lectures. He calls this an experiment, and when the section holding discussions has higher grades on both the midterm and final exams, he declares that class discussions improve learning. Has he conducted an experiment? What are some possible sources of error in the conclusions he has drawn?

4)            A researcher designs a “classic” experiment and discovers that 6th grade students in one classroom who were assigned to an experimental group using computers were much better at correctly solving arithmetic problems as compared to the students in a control group in the classroom that did not use computers. Because the study was conducted in a single classroom with only 30 students, the findings cannot be generalized to other situations. Given that limitation, is there any value to completing the research at all?