Topic: Hypotheses, Variables, Validities, and Data
READING ASSIGNMENT
Fraenkel & Wallen Text: Chapters 3, 7, 8, and 9
WRITTEN ASSIGNMENT
For this assignment, take your questions carried forward from Unit 1, modified if appropriate after my comments, and expand each in the following ways:
1. Restate your research questions as a hypothesis, if possible, or indicate what hypotheses might emerge in the course of the project.
2. Take your first cut on the kinds of information you would collect, the means by which you would collect it, and how you would aggregate and analyze it.
3. Speculate on what issues might emerge involving extraneous variables and/or problems with constructs or constants, and how you might address them.
4. Indicate what possible conclusions you might anticipate emerging from the work and if you think one is the most likely, and say why.
(Remember that this is a design course and that your final Unit 5 project will be a paper describing a fully-fledged design, but not a paper describing the results of that design actually carried out. One of your design criteria, however, needs to be feasibility—you should be able to carry out the proposed work yourself, assisted only by friends and colleagues. Or, if additional resources would be needed, indicate how you realistically propose to acquire them.)
