3 ms·

The margin of error in the results is greater than the difference between the groups.

• dr_orpheus 6y ago
  Are the +/- values the distribution of the data rather than the margin of error. So on average the cookie group was still better. Also I wonder if someone could draw the same conclusion that the environment being taught in (i.e. has cookies) is an important factor along with the actual material being taught.
• pacbard 6y ago
  I don't know what you mean by margin of error. The results in the paper are a little confusing because they report mean and standard deviation while t-tests use mean and standard error. In Table 3, they report the 95% confidence interval for the treatment condition (i.e., receiving cookies) as 0.67–11.62, so it seems that the difference between the two conditions is significant at the 5% level. Interestingly, the reported p-value here is "just" 0.02 instead of the <0.001 that they include in the abstract.
• laGrenouille 6y ago
  Yes, I was confused about that as well. I think that the results are given as (mean +/- sd) rather than (mean +/- SE), though I do not understand why. Is that common in any field? I have not seen it in the computational social sciences or medicine fields, at least not right next to a p-value.