Question

Hypothesis testing on a paired sample, using the sign test.
An educational psychologist suspects that having cats improves performance on statistics finals. With funding from the Socks foundation, she did a pair study, with carefully chosen pairs of students, one having a cat, and the other none. She obtained thae following faired data values, consiting of: test score of student with cat/test score of student without cat
58/56, 51/51, 66/65, 56/55, 67/66, 77/45, 88/60, 61/60, 91/92, 92/88, 100/54, 100/100, 88/76, 99/95, 67/57, 57/86, 94/88, 89/88
Explain a way of dealing with ties and find the p-value.

Answer 1

Here are a few hints.

Step 1: Look at the values of each set of test scores (test score of student with cat versus test score of student without cat). Assign a minus if the scores decreased; assign a plus if the scores increased. Assign a 0 for those who remained the same.

Step 2: Use the appropriate table for this type of test. Determine the total number of the least frequent sign. Remember that this is a one-tailed test. Determine the p-value from the table. (Hint: n = 16; the 0's are not counted.)

I hope this will help.