Question

I need assistance with this question:

A psychology professor is interested in whether implementing weekly quizzes improves student learning. She decides to use the weekly quizzes in one section of her introductory psychology class and not use them in another section of the same course. Which type of quasi-experimental design do you recommend for this study?

I understand that it should be the non-equivalent control group design, because the groups are not randomly assigned, and there is a treatment group and a control group. But i need assistance in understanding which type will be the best in this case. nonequivalent control group posttest only, nonequivalent control group pretest/posttest, or multiple-group time-series design? And why in this particular case one of those three will be better than the other two?

Thanks!

Answer 1

The recommendation would be to use the Nonequivalent control group post test - only design.

Because with nonequivalent control group post test - only design, there is a non-equivalent control group added. This control group is used as a comparison group. The participants are not assigned to the control group in a random manner. In this design subjects are normally grouped as they come to study. This would be the case in classroom setting. The professor already has the classes and research is applied to the groups as they are. This means that the groups are determined for the ones taking the pretests and the ones not.