Synopsis of the data set.
Scenario
You are an educational psychologist interested in the effect of cognitive load on student performance. You ask; will students perform better on tasks which are more concrete or more abstract in representation? Since you can’t convince the education department to allow you to set the curriculum or train teachers to work according to your experimental plan you conduct a large scale natural experiment which involves going out to a large number of schools and assessing the cognitive load of the material presented by teachers in a given class; You call this variable “challenge” The work student is asked to complete in class is classified as from “low concrete work” to “high abstract work”.
You propose to use as an outcome variable the results of standard tests of literacy and numeracy taken annually at the end of the year. The difference in reading and math scores from the end of one year to the end of the next proves and indication of change in performance over time. Student learning should be evident in a significant change in the combined literacy and numeracy scores over the course of the year.
You hypothesise based on the work of Luke that;
Over time more educational gains will be seen in students who engage in more abstract high demand work than low demand concrete work.
However, Luke argues that this performance increase is only seen where students are provided with adequate support from the teacher. Luke calls this “warm demandingness”. So you further predict;
A significant interaction between a measure of teacher support and task challenge.
As you may know typically the largest single impact on student performance is teacher quality (said with deference to teachers) you have also recorded information the type of training each classroom teacher has had in the form of professional development training since qualification. You may want to investigate if there is any evidence of teacher level differences. However, from a research point of view this might be considered more of a nuisance than main effect. That is differences in teacher training may confound the results of the study. Likewise you know that Socio-economic status is thought to account for much student variation in performance. You could control for these confounds using a MANCOVA approach but that is not necessary for the purpose of the current study.
The data set.
The data set contains data obtained from the investigation collected from some 886 children over many schools and classes. The variables collected include;
School:(Site information)
SESI: Socio-economic status as measured by the IRSED (Index of Relative Socio-Economic Disadvantage).
Training: Type of PD teacher has experienced. Four types of training are listed; content area specialisation training, automaticity training (to improve fluency of hand writing), Curriculum area training, and integrated curriculum training (involves presenting children with rich tasks that use both literacy and numerical skills).
Challenge:There are four levels of challenge from low concrete representing the simplest level of task to low abstract representing the most challenging of tasks.
Level:There are two levels of teacher support low and high.
Each DV is measured at the end of the year. Hence the name read97, and read98. These act as a pre and post-test measure of performance. You have 2 DV’s. The DV’s are;
read97,read98– end of year performance on a standardised reading test.
math97,math98:- end of year performance on a standardised numeracy test.
As such you have a simple 2(Time: Pre-test, Post-test) x 4(Challenge: low concrete, mid concrete, high concrete, low abstract) x 2(Support: low, high) design mixed MANOVA with 2 DV’s to analyse.
The task
Use MANOVA to determine the impact of task challenge on children’s literacy. You don’t need to write an introduction or method for this assignment. The material provided is sufficient to make interpretative comments in a brief discussion. You don’t need to do a great literature review the description of instruments above is simply to provide context. YOUR TASK IS TO CONDUCT AND WRITE UP A MANOVA. The results section should adhere to APA conventions. Since the results section deals only with reporting the results, to demonstrate your understanding of the findings of the study you should include a brief discussion. You should not need to refer to the literature. The purpose of this assessment item is to assess your analysis and reporting of results. You will not be marked on introductions or method sections as this is a results analysis and interpretation exercise.
