A statistics professor teaches one of their online courses using several short videos covering small pieces of the content. They teach another of their courses using single longer videos similar to a classroom lecture. The average student grades for each class are compared to see which teaching method is more effective.

Question

Which type of hypothesis test is appropriate for this situation?

Hypothesis test for two independent means
Hypothesis Test for two paired (dependent) means
Hypothesis Test for one mean
Not enough information to tell

Answer 1

In this situation, the professor is comparing the average student grades from two different teaching methods: short videos versus longer, classroom-style lectures. Since these two sets of grades (from each teaching method) come from separate, independent groups of students (i.e., the students taking the online course using short videos are different from those taking the course with longer videos), the appropriate hypothesis test would be:

Hypothesis test for two independent means.

This test is used to determine if there is a statistically significant difference between the means of two independent groups.