Topic 5 Day 3. Today's Agenda:

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1 Today's Agenda: Topic 5 Day 3 1. Correct and collect Activities 5 9 & Finish Activity 5 5 from yesterday 3. "The Onion" article 4. Activity 5 5. Derren Brown video clips. Activity Activity Start Homework: Activities 5 19 & 5 24 Objectives: Students will be able to draw a flow chart for an experiment Students will be able to explain what a placebo is and why it is used. Students will be able to identify whether blindness is used in an experiment. Students will be able to discern whether a study is an observational study or an experiment. Topic 5 Preliminaries 1. How many letters can YOU memorize? 2. Record the results of your classmates:

2 Activity 5 5: Memorizing Letters Use your notebook paper e. Use your graphing calculator and create comparative dotplots for the JFK data vs. the JFKC data. f. Does the data support the conjecture that those who receive letters in meaningful chunks tend to memorize more letters? If we just look at the spread and the average, we see that the JFK group goes from 3 to 24 (larger numbers) where the JFKC group goes from 0 to 20 (lower numbers) and the average for the JFK group is (larger number) and the average for the JFKC group is 11.5 (smaller number). g. Can we legitimately say that the meaningful chunks CAUSES people to memorize more letters? Why or why not? Yes. We used an experiment that utilized random assignment, a control group, and blindness.

3 The Onion and FDA approval for Placebo 1. Comment about the illnesses that placebo potentially cures and the possible side effects that may occur while taking placebo 2. The drug placebo is obtained from what type of plant What is the common name for this plant 3. What forms of medication will placebo be available in for purchase? 4. Comment on some of the other silly concepts in the article. 5. Comment on the advertisements throughout the article or on product names.

4 Activity 5 : Therapeutic Touch do with a partner a. Was this an observational study or an experiment? experiment Emily controlled which practitioner received which treatment (which hand she held hers over). b. Explain how the principle of random assignment was employed in this study. Emily flipped a coin to randomly determine whether she would hold her hand over the practitioners left or right hand. c. Was the study double blind? No. The study was blind, not double blind. Emily knew which treatment each practitioner was receiving. d. Would you be willing to generalize the results Emily obtained for these practitioners to all practitioners? No. Emily's sample consisted of volunteers. They were not randomly selected from all practitioners, so the results could be biased. e. If these practitioners do show a strong tendency to correctly identify which hand Emily is holding hers over, would you be willing to attribute this tendency to detection of Emily's energy field? No. Even though this was an experiment, a control group was not used. A better experimental design would be to include a group of non therapeutic touch practitioners so results could be compared from group to group.

5 Derren Brown Psychic abilities start at 1:14 How many times do the people wearing white pass the basketball? Psychic abilities Creating an advertisement

6 Activity 5 25: Dolphin Therapy a. Is this an observational study or an experiment? experiment Researchers controlled who got to swim with dolphins and who didn't. b. Explanatory: Swim with dolphins or not Type: CB Response: Change in depression symptoms Type: C c. Does this study permit a cause and effect conclusion between swimming with dolphins and depression symptoms improving? Yes Assuming the sample was representative and that subjects were randomly assigned to each group, we can establish cause andeffect because this was a well designed experiment. d. Were the subjects in this study blind as to which treatment they received? No Could they have been (considering the research question)? No It would be impossible to make subjects unaware that they are or are not swimming with dolphins. Activity 5 22: Prayers, Cell Phones, School Uniforms How would you set up each of the following scenarios as an experiment? Draw a flow chart for each. a. Is the use of cell phones by automobile drivers a hazard? We would set up an experiment by 1. Taking a randomly selected group of drivers from the population of all drivers; 2. We would randomly assign the drivers to two groups: one group is told to use their cell phones while driving and one group is told they cannot use their cell phones while driving; then 3. We will keep track of who gets in accidents while driving. We cannot set this up as an experiment because it would be unethical to put unsuspecting drivers (those in the cars not involved in the experiment) in harm's way by having our subjects use their phones while driving.