Think in relation to a college professor, John, who claims he is a superior teac

Question

Think in relation to a college professor, John, who claims he is a superior teacher because his Introduction to Psychology class performed better than the class taught by another teacher Drew, did on their final exam.

Briefly describe the need to validate the result of any research study

Is it important for a study to have high internal validity? What if Drew’s students had to take the exam during a time when construction was going on outside the window? What if there is suspicion of cheating on the part of a number of John’s students? Use the concepts of internal validity and discuss the problems with John’s claim.

Consider the same concept for external validity. What conditions must be met inside the college to be able to have high external validity? What are the advantages of conducting experiments in a laboratory (box-like environment)?

If John were to use this information to support his teaching strategies in a publication, would this be an example of accurate reporting of information? Why or why not?

Explanation / Answer

The purpose of any research is to produce results which are scientific, reliable, valid both internally and externally and can be replicated. This means that any study must therefore, be scientifically done.

In the present case, John’s teaching has been compared and questioned about the validity it is having.

While conducting any study, particularly where Independent Variable is manipulated, care must be exercised where the role of error variance is identified and minimized. The manipulation of independent variable must be maximum and proper control must be taken for extraneous variance. In the present case, John’s teaching ability is under question because of many flaws in the research. The research lacks internal and external validity because, the generalizability of the fact that John’s teaching ability is better than Drew’s cannot be said with conviction. In other words, the groups were not matched, that is, students in John’s class and Drew’s class are not matched, therefore, there are chances that the level of intelligence of the respondents in both the groups may significantly vary. Thus, it cannot be said that better performance of John’s students is because of his teaching ability.

Secondly, it may also be possible that students in John’s class may have retorted to other methods for gaining knowledge and not just relying on the class room teaching. Therefore, many extraneous variables seem to be active in this study.

Therefore, for any experimental research, care must be taken to exercise the rules and laws of experimental research.

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