Unit 0 Summative Assessment

A student is interested in knowing how widely the academic aptitude of college-bound students varies at her school. Which of the following statistical methods should she use to determine how much students’ SAT scores vary from the school’s average SAT score?

• Correlation coefficient
• Mean
• Percentile rank
• Standard deviation

Which method should a psychology researcher use if she is interested in testing whether a specific reward in a classroom situation causes students to behave better?

• Case study
• Experiment
• Survey
• Correlation

In a perfectly normal distribution of scores, which of the following statements is true?

• The mean, median, and mode are all the same number.
• The mode is equal to the standard deviation.
• The scores are positively correlated.
• There is a positive skew to the distribution of data.

Which of the following describes the placebo effect?

• Students in art class are not told that their work will be evaluated for a scholarship so they do not submit their best work.
• Participants in an experiment do not know if they are in the experimental or control group so their attitudes about the study are unaffected.
• Participants in a drug study are given an inert pill instead of the drug and behave as though they were given the drug.
• Only women are chosen for a study, even though the population included men

Which of the following represents naturalistic observation?

• Researchers go to the mall and distribute surveys about the stores in the mall.
• Researchers bring participants into a laboratory to see how they respond to a puzzle with no solution.
• A principal looks at the relationship between the number of student absences and their grades.
• Researchers observe students' seating patterns in the cafeteria

“Monday morning quarterbacks” rarely act surprised about the outcome of weekend football games. This tendency to believe they knew how the game would turn out is best explained by which psychological principle?

• Overconfidence
• Hindsight bias
• Illusory correlation
• Random sampling

Which of the following statements best describes the graph below?

• This is a scatterplot of a perfect positive correlation.
• This is a scatterplot of a weak negative correlation.
• This is a histogram of a weak positive correlation.
• This is a histogram of a perfect positive correlation.

A journalism student is writing an article about her school's new cell-phone policy, and she'd like to interview a random sample of students. Which of the following is the best example of a random sample?

• The writer arrives at school early and interviews the first five students who come through the main entrance.
• The writer pulls the names of five students from a hat that contains all students’ names. She interviews the five selected students.
• The writer asks her teacher if she can distribute a brief survey to the students in her AP® Psychology class.
• The writer passes out brief surveys to 50 students in the hall and uses the 18 surveys returned to her as the basis of her article.

Which of the following is a positive correlation?

• As study time increases, students achieve lower grades.
• As levels of self-esteem decline, levels of depression increase.
• The more people exercise, the better they sleep.
• Gas mileage decreases as vehicle weight increases.

Why is random assignment of participants to groups an important aspect of a properly designed experiment?

• If the participants are randomly assigned, the researcher can assume that each group is similar to each other at the beginning of the study.
• By randomly assigning participants, the researcher knows that whatever is learned from the experiment will also be true for the population from which the participants were selected.
• If participants are not randomly assigned, it is impossible to replicate the experiment.
• Statistical analysis cannot be performed on an experiment if random assignment is not used.