• What are the main results of the study? 
• Can the results be used to answer the research question(s)? 
• Can the results be generalized beyond the context of the study? 

What are the main results of the study?
 
 

Can the results be used to answer the research question(s)? 
 

Can the results be generalized beyond the context of the study? 

Final Exam Scores and Helpfulness Ratings

Balch (1998) compared final exam scores for high, middle, and low achieving students who participated in the practice-exam group with scores in for high, middle, and low achieving students who participated in the review-exam group.  He used analysis of variance (ANOVA) to test whether there was any statistically significant difference between the different students.  ANOVA is used when we want to test the difference between more than two means.  Balch was interested in overall difference between the practice-exam and the review-exam group, the differences in exam performance between the high, middle, and low achieving students, and any differences that differentially affected students in the practice-exam and review-exam groups (the interaction between the two groups as a function of class achievement).  Compare the means in Table 1 with the statements about significant differences in the text.

Post Hoc Analyses of the Sample-Exam Tasks
Although not presented in the Introduction, Balch (1998) compared the accuracy-assessment and levels-of-processing hypotheses as explanations for the findings in the Discussion.

To rule out the levels-of-processing hypothesis, Balch used correlational analyses to determine whether students were attending to the review-exam task.  If students were attending to the items in the practice-test group, and therefore exerting cognitive effort, correlations between test items should be high.  If students in the review-exam group were not paying much attention, and therefore exerting little cognitive effort, they should show a lot of variability in their ratings, and correlations of ratings of the test items should be low.  Furthermore, the correlations between the two groups, namely the practice-exam and the review-exam groups, should be statistically significantly different from each other.

Another approach to ruling out the levels-of-processing hypothesis was to compare final exam performance for students who did not participate in the research with students in the review-exam group.  If students were not attending in the review-exam group, their final exam performance should be the same as students who did not participate in the research.  Balch used a t-test to compare the performance of the two groups, namely students who did not participate versus students in the review-exam group.