Basic Psychology, Aim/Type/Identifying flaws in this experiment

[ibsweden144]

The Power of Sesame Street to Improve Reading

Phillip is a very enthusiastic elementary school teacher who believes that the best way to improve his students’ reading ability is for them to watch educational TV programmes like Sesame Street. He wants to see if watching TV can make a difference.

He invites the parents of his class to a meeting and assigns the first parents to arrive to the group whose children will watch one hour of Sesame Street each day for 3 months. The other group will watch cartoons for the same period of time. He tells the parents what he hopes the results will show better scores on a reading test for the children who watch educational TV shows like Sesame Street compared to the group who watch cartoons. He also instructs the parents to interact and talk to the children as they watch Sesame Street but the other parents do not have to do this.

After three months he gives all children a reading test and finds that the Sesame Street group have much higher scores. He is convinced that watching educational TV show improves reading.

1. What is the aim of the experiment?
   
2. What type of experiment is this?
   
3. What is the research hypothesis?
   
4. What is the IV and the DV?
   
5. What flaws can you identify in this experiment?
   

I just started IB-Psychology and it's pretty hard, I know the aim/Hypothesis and IV/DV but I don't know what flaws and type this experiment is.

[blindpet]

This is a great exercise but understandably confusing if you've just started. There are two points I think your teacher wants you to discuss: demand characteristics and confounding variables. Demand characteristics are when the experimenter discloses to the participants what the experiment is about, this way the participants can intentionally make the results turn out the way the experimenter wants (sesame street means better reading) or purposely screw it up (practice lots of reading with the kids who aren't watching sesame street). The second point is confounding variables, these are variables that you are not controlling for which can affect the outcome of the experiment. Telling the parents in the sesame street Group to interact with the children could affect their verbal ability and possibly their reading ability so it might not be exclusively the sesame street watching that is improving the reading, it could also be the parental interaction: the parental interaction is a confounding variable. Those are the flaws I see in this experiment, if you need further clarification just reply to this thread. Enjoy IB Psych .