Question

Gender and number words: Chang, Sandhofer, and Brown (2011) wondered whether mothers used number words more, on average, with their preschool sons than with their preschool daughters. Each participating family included one mother and one child—either female or male. They speculated that early exposure to more number words might predispose children to like mathematics. They reported the following: “An independent-samples t test revealed statistically significant differences in the percentages of overall numeric speech used when interacting with boys compared with girls, t(30) = 2.40, p< .05, d = .88. That is, mothers used number terms with boys an average of 9.49% of utterances (SD = 6.78%) compared with 4.64% of utterances with girls (SD = 4.43%)”.

Question 1 - How many children were in the total sample? Explain how you determined this.

Question 2 - What is the null hypothesis?

Question 3 - Describe how you could design an experiment to test whether exposure to more number words in preschool leads children to like mathematics more when they enter school.

Answer 1

Answer:

1) No.of children in the total sample = 60

30 boys and 30 girls

2) The null hypothesis is

percentages of overall numeric speech used when interacting with boys compared with girls is same.

Here p<0.5. Hence, we reject null hypothesis

3) We should collect information about no.of words in preschool that mother used with their child. Then, we perform a regression analysis and test the effect of no.of words on the interest of children in mathematics when they join school