Mr. Ikeler conducted a study investigating the effectiveness of a new method for teaching a mathematics unit. He recruited 80 students at a college and randomly assigned them to two groups. Group 1 was taught with the new method, and group 2 was taught with the traditional method. Both groups were taught by the same teacher. At the end of the unit, an achievement test was administered and used to make a comparison of the two groups. What is the response variable in the study?

The response variable is the test's score.

Step-by-step explanation:

Since we want to know if the new method is effective, we need to compare it with something, in this case we want to compare the new method with the traditional method.

The response variable in the study represents the measurement of a quantity or characteristic that the researcher wants to analyse. Since the only way of measuring the effectiveness of the new meetod is through a test, the it's natural to think that the test's score would be a good enough variable to start.

For example, we could verify if the mean score from each test are equal or not, and then we could use a statistical test to build a confidence interval for the difference in means.

As i see, we could also see the response variable as "the student has passed" and then we could build a test for the proportion of students with a good enough score to pass. And then we would build a test and all the procedures in order to make inferences for all students.

Since the first kind of response variables is frequently used more, i will stick with it. So my final anwser would be that the test's score would be the response variable.