The stimulant Ritalin has been shown to increase attention span and improve academic performance in children with ADHD (Evans et al., 2001). To demonstrate the effectiveness of the drug, a researcher selects a sample of n = 20 children diagnosed with the disorder and measures each child’s attention span before and after taking the drug. The data show an average increase of attention span of MD = 4.8 minutes with a variance of s2 = 125 for the sample of difference scores. Is this result sufficient to conclude that Ritalin significantly improves attention span? Use a one tailed test with α = .05. Compute the 80% confidence interval for the mean change in attention span for the population
Continuous Probability Distributions
Probability distributions are of two types, which are continuous probability distributions and discrete probability distributions. A continuous probability distribution contains an infinite number of values. For example, if time is infinite: you could count from 0 to a trillion seconds, billion seconds, so on indefinitely. A discrete probability distribution consists of only a countable set of possible values.
Normal Distribution
Suppose we had to design a bathroom weighing scale, how would we decide what should be the range of the weighing machine? Would we take the highest recorded human weight in history and use that as the upper limit for our weighing scale? This may not be a great idea as the sensitivity of the scale would get reduced if the range is too large. At the same time, if we keep the upper limit too low, it may not be usable for a large percentage of the population!
The stimulant Ritalin has been shown to increase attention span and improve academic performance in children with ADHD (Evans et al., 2001). To demonstrate the effectiveness of the drug, a researcher selects a sample of n = 20 children diagnosed with the disorder and measures each child’s attention span before and after taking the drug. The data show an average increase of attention span of MD = 4.8 minutes with a variance of s2 = 125 for the sample of difference scores.
- Is this result sufficient to conclude that Ritalin significantly improves attention span? Use a one tailed test with α = .05.
- Compute the 80% confidence interval for the
mean change in attention span for the population
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