A new methodology has been proposed for teaching English to undergraduate students. This methodology (which we call X) has been tested with a group of 27 students. Initially, the lecturer in charge of the course was sure that more than 50% of the classroom would fail the course if this methodology X is applied.
The final grades obtained by the students were (being 55 the minimum passing mark):
60,25,45,0,90,35,0,70,5,70,0,0,65,55,55,40,50,65,65,30,0,70,0,50,5,50,20
I have made the following program in R to check if my data is normally distributed:
data=c(60,25,45,0,90,35,0,70,5,70,0,0,65,55,55,40,50,65,65,30,0,70,0,50,5,50,20)
length(data)
summary(data)
d=density(data)
boxplot(data)
plot(d)
qqnorm(data)
qqline(data)
hist(data,breaks=length(data),xlim=c(0,100),ylim=c(0,10),freq=TRUE)
For the obtained graphs I can see that my data is not normally distributed, so I decided to apply a non-parametric test, specifically the Wilcoxon Test, to see if the hypothesis that more than 50% of the students will fail the course if this methodology is applied; the code is:
wilcox.test(data,alternative="less",mu=50,conf.int=TRUE)
I consider the value of mu as the hypothesized median value, the results I obtained were the following:
Wilcoxon signed rank test with continuity correction
data: data
V = 81.5, p-value = 0.02565
alternative hypothesis: true location is less than 50
95 percent confidence interval:
-Inf 47.49996
sample estimates:
(pseudo)median
34.99995
Warning messages:
1: In wilcox.test.default(data, alternative = "less", mu = 50, conf.int = TRUE) :
cannot compute exact p-value with ties
2: In wilcox.test.default(data, alternative = "less", mu = 50, conf.int = TRUE) :
cannot compute exact confidence interval with ties
3: In wilcox.test.default(data, alternative = "less", mu = 50, conf.int = TRUE) :
cannot compute exact p-value with zeroes
4: In wilcox.test.default(data, alternative = "less", mu = 50, conf.int = TRUE) :
cannot compute exact confidence interval with zeroes
For what I know this means that the mean differs significantly from the hypothesis value of 50. So did I manage to prove that the application of this new methodology made that more than half of the class failed the course? In case that all my analysis is wrong, could somebody guide me about how to prove that the application of the new methodology had an effect in the huge number of students who failed the course and was not by random? Please consider that I do not have a former education in statistics.
PD. Another lecturer from other classroom was prompted to use this new methodology X, the number of students that took the course with her was like 30 approximately, but instead she used the OLD methodology; having very low number of students who failed the course. Unfortunately and because of administrative burdens I was not able to gather detailed information about the marks of each of those students.