MS 150 quiz ten 11.1 • Name:

25 November 2011

Each term in physical science I survey the students to determine their favorite laboratories for the term. The data is from fall 2010 and fall 2011 terms. The number in the second and third columns are the number of "votes" for that laboratory as a favorite laboratory.

If the data in the second and third columns is pairwise identical, then each lab will have the same number of "likes" in each term and there is no statistical difference between the students choices in fall 2010 and fall 2011. In this case we would fail to reject the null hypothesis. If the data was pairwise identical, then the p-value would be 1.00.

If the p-value is 1.00, then there would be 0% confidence of any difference. This would mean that the students favorite labs fall 2010 are the same as the favorite labs fall 2011.

The data, however, is NOT pairwise identical. No student selected lab two as a favorite lab fall 2010, but two students picked lab two as a favorite lab fall 2011.

The data is not pairwise identical and therefore there is a difference in the students choices. The p-value will be less than one.
If the p-value is less than 0.10, then we could consider the students choices to be significantly different.
If the p-value is more than 0.10, then the students favorite choices are statistically the same.

Thus the implicit question is whether students choices of favorite laboratory has changed year-on-year.

1. __________________ What is the p-value? Use the second and third columns in a paired TTEST function with two tails to determine the p-value for this two sample data.
2. __________________ Is the pairwise difference statistically significant at a risk of a type I error alpha α = 0.10?
3. __________________ Would we fail to reject | or | reject a null hypothesis of no pairwise difference in the samples at a risk of a type I error alpha α = 0.10?
4. __________________ What is the maximum level of confidence we can have that the difference is statistically significant?
5. __________________ Toughie: Are the favorite labs for the students fall 2011 statistically the same as the favorite labs of fall 2010?