Phillips Flawed Experiment

Model Answer

1. 1. The focal behavior of the experiment is the reading ability of young children and the factors that enhance this ability.


2. 2. The hypothesis is that watching one hour of an educational program like Sesame Street each day for 3 months will improve reading ability as measured by a standards reading test. Alternatively, the hypothesis is that the group who watched the educational TV show will have a higher mean reading score as measured by a standard reading test than the group that watch non educational TV shows.


3. The IV is the type of TV program watched, either educational or non educational.


4. The DV is the scores achieved on a standardized reading test.


5. 1) The experimenter told the participant’s parents his hypothesis and they may have tried to improve reading in other way. 2) The experimenter did not randomly select from a target population to remove confounding variables and enable generalizations to be made.
   3) The experimenter did not randomly assign participants to the two groups and this may have introduced confounding variables.
6. The experiment was not valid because it did not employ statistics to determine whether the results occurred by chance. Inferential statistic can determine the level of significance of the results, only then will the conclusion be valid.