If a researcher were studying the effects of a teaching method on patient learning outcomes, how must he or she word the hypothesis to use a t-test to test for statistical differences? What type of data must he or she collect? Why?

Answer 1

I'll give you a few hints. You might try a correlated or dependent groups t-test on this situation. In a test of this type, each subject participates in two research conditions (a "before treatment" condition and an "after treatment" condition). In symbolic form, the null hypothesis would state the population means are equal and the alternate hypothesis would state the population means are not equal. If the null is rejected and the alternate accepted, you would then be able to conclude a statistical difference.