Eat well and exercise Most American adolescents don’t eat well and don’t exercise enough. Can middle schools increase physical activity among their students? Can they persuade students to eat

better? Investigators designed a “physical activity intervention” to increase activity in physical education classes and during leisure periods throughout the school day. They also designed a “nutrition intervention” that improved school lunches and offered ideas for healthy home-packed lunches. Each participating school was randomly assigned to one of the interventions, both interventions, or no intervention. The investigators observed physical activity and lunchtime

consumption of fat.

Short Answer

Expert verified

Experimental unit: Middle Schools.

Explanatory variables: whether the service was designed for physical exercise and whether diet.

Program offered.

Treatments: 4 drug varieties planned by experts.

Response variable: physical exercise and fat intake at lunchtime.

Step by step solution

01

Given information

The researchers devised a "physical activity intervention" to encourage students to be more active in physical education classes and during free time during the school day. They also created a "nutrition intervention" that enhanced school lunches and provided healthy home-packed lunch alternatives. One of the interventions, both interventions, or no interventions were randomly assigned to each participating school. The researchers looked at physical activity and fat consumption during lunchtime.

02

Concept

The treatments are randomly assigned to all of the experimental units in a completely randomized design.

In a double-blind experiment, neither the subjects nor the people who interact with them and assess the response variable are aware of the treatment they received.

Observational research looks at people and assesses factors of interest without trying to affect their responses.

Individuals are purposely subjected to a treatment in order to measure their responses in an experiment.

03

Explanation

Middle Schools as an experimental unit

Explanatory variables include whether the service was intended for physical activity and whether the diet was followed.

The program is available.

Experts have proposed four medication kinds as treatments. The following are the four treatments: 1) the operation's interference (2) diet participation, and(3) both. 4)no participation at all.

Physical activity and fat intake at lunchtime are the response variables.

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Most popular questions from this chapter

Wake-up call Do people naturally wake up earlier when they set an alarm before going to sleep? Justin decides to conduct his own experiment to find out. On Friday and Saturday nights, he doesn’t set the alarm before going to bed. On Monday and Tuesday, he sets the alarm for 7a.m. Justin records the time when he wakes up each day and then compares his average wake-up time with and without the alarm.

(a) Identify any flaws you see in the proposed design for this experiment.

(b) Describe how you would design the experiment. Explain how your design addresses each of the problems you identified in (a).

Learning biology with computers An educator wants to compare the effectiveness of computer software for teaching biology with that of a textbook presentation. She gives a biology pretest to each group of high school juniors, then randomly divides them into two groups. One group uses the computer, and the other studies the text. At the end of the year, she tests all the students again and compares the increase in biology test scores in the two groups.

(a) Is this an observational study or an experiment? Justify your answer.

(b) If the group using the computer has a much higher average increase in test scores than the group using the textbook, what conclusions if any, could the educator draw?

Is yawning contagious?According to the popular TV show Mythbusters, the answer is “Yes.” In the March 9,2005, episode, the Mythbusters team presented the results of an experiment involving 50subjects. All the subjects were placed in a booth for an extended period of time and monitored by hidden camera. Two-thirds of the subjects were given a “yawn seed” by one of the experimenters; that is, the experimenter yawned in the subject’s presence prior to leaving the room. The remaining subjects were given no yawn seed. What were the results? Of the 16subjects who had no yawn seed, 4 yawned. Of the 34 subjects given a yawn seed, 10 yawned. Adam Savage and Jamie Hyneman, the cohosts of Mythbusters, used these results to conclude that yawning is contagious.

(a) Explain how you could use slips of paper to randomly reassign the subjects to the treatment groups.

(b) Suppose we used your method in (a) to redo the random assignment 50 times. The Fathom dotplot displays the number of subjects in the yawn seed who yawned in each of these random assignments. What conclusion would you draw about whether yawning is contagious? Explain.

Effects of TV advertising Figure 4.3displays the six treatments for a two-factor experiment on TV advertising. Suppose we have 150students who are willing to serve as subjects. Describe how you would randomly assign the subjects to the treatments

(a) using slips of paper.

(b) using Table D.

(c) using technology.

Running red lights The sample described in Exercise 31produced a list of 5024licensed drivers. The investigators then chose an SRS of 880 of these drivers to answer questions about their driving habits. One question asked was: “Recalling the last ten traffic lights you drove through, how many of them were red when you entered the intersections?” Of the 880 respondents, 171admitted that at least one light had been red. A practical problem with this survey is that people may not give truthful answers. What is the likely direction of the bias: do you think more or fewer than 171 of the 880 respondents really ran a red light? Why?

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