Take your learning a step further by testing your critical thinking skills on this scientific problem solving exercise

___1___

Philip, who teaches first grade, believes that educational television programs such as Sesame Street promote reading ability in young children. He announces his hunch to his students and tells their parents about his idea during a P.T.A. meeting. Some parents respond enthusiastically when he asks for volunteers to participate in a 3-month experiment to test his hypothesis. Ten volunteers are assigned to the experimental group and instructed to have their children watch the 1-hour Sesame Street program each day after school. The parents of 10 other students, who are picked at random from the remaining members of the class, receive the same instructions except that the target program is a 1-hour, noneducational cartoon. After the 3-month period, Philip administers a standardized reading test to both groups. He is delighted to find that students in the experimental group have a substantially higher average test score than students in the comparison group.

1. What is the focal behavior of the study?

2. What is Philip's hypothesis?

3. What is the independent variable?

4. What is the dependent variable?

5. List three variables that are controlled in the experiment.

6. List three variables that aren't controlled and explain how they might have affected Philip's findings.

7. Was the research a valid test of the hypothesis? Explain your reasoning.

___2___

Carlton, who owns a publishing company that employs copy editors, personnel managers, and acquisitions editors, is fascinated by individual differences in intelligence. He believes that in each person there exists a measurable general mental capacity that forms the basis for all cognitive skills. Over the years, Carlton has made a study of the job performance of the people he hires. All applicants are required to take an intelligence test of his own invention: They are given a lengthy passage full of spelling, grammar, and punctuation errors, which they are expected to correct. To calculate the applicant's intelligence score, the number of proofreading errors missed is subtracted from the number of errors corrected. Over lunch with a friend one day, Carlton confides that he has had mixed results in predicting employee success. Whether people become successful employees or not seems to depend more on the type of job they are assigned than on their pre-employment test score.

What does Carlton mean by "intelligence"? What does his test actually measure?

Why doesn't Carlton's test measure what he wants it to measure?

What would be a more sensible way for Carlton to test potential employees?