Key topics

Readings

These questions cover materials in:

Questions

Question 1

Instructions

“As part of the planning process one of the first things you will need is an idea of what you are trying to show…” Gardener (2014)

Consider an ecological question you might examine using one of the project types from Gardener 5.1.

  • Your example must be different from the book examples.

Null and alternative hypotheses

1 pt, short answer

  • State the null hypothesis for your research question.

1 pt, short answer

  • State a non-directional alternative hypothesis for your research question.

2 pt, short answer

  • Briefly describe what kind of information you would need to know in order to specify a directional alternative hypothesis for your research question.

1 pt, short answer

  • State a directional alternative hypothesis for your research question.

Question 2

Instructions

Suppose you are studying three species of penguins (Gentoo, chinstrap, Adelie) in the Palmer Archipelago in the Southern Ocean.

You have collected data on many attributes of individual birds including body size, age, etc. For this question you may assume that all required assumptions of normality are met.

  • For each of the research question select the most appropriate test from the available options.

Questions

Multiple choice: 1 pt

  • You want to know whether there is a difference in flipper length between male and female Gentoo penguins.

select the best answer

Multiple choice: 1 pt

  • You want to know whether the egg incubation period is different among the three species.

select the best answer

Multiple choice: 1 pt

  • You want to know whether male chinstrap penguins are heavier than female chinstrap penguins.

select the best answer

Question 3

Instructions

Consider the following scenario: doctors are testing blood sugar levels before and after a treatment in males and females. There are 50 subjects (25 of each sex) assumed to be representative of the population of 18 to 25 year-olds in Amherst.

You want to know if there was a significant difference in blood sugar before and after the test.

You conduct a Shapiro test of normality of the pre-treatment data (review Chapter 4.4 if you don’t remember how to interpret this) in R and get the following output:

## 
##  Shapiro-Wilk normality test
## 
## data:  rnorm(n = 50, mean = 100)
## W = 0.98332, p-value = 0.6979

1 pt: multiple choice

Which of the following is the most appropriate statistical test?

Submit to Moodle

These questions are for your reference, the same questions will appear in the assignment page on Moodle.

You should do your work outside of Moodle, saving your answers in a document and/or R script file.

When you are ready to submit your answers, you can paste your complete responses in the corresponding Moodle question entries for the assignment.