Hypothesis Testing Procedure

7. Hypothesis Testing: Introduction to Hypothesis Testing

Hypothesis Testing Procedure

This chapter introduces the concept of hypothesis testing, one of the most commonly used inferential procedures.
$\phantom{0}$

Hypothesis Testing

Hypothesis testing is a statistical procedure that is used to draw inferences about a population on the basis of sample data.

There are many different hypothesis tests and although they all have their own nuances, the general procedure is the same for each one:

State the hypotheses
Set the criteria for a decision
Collect the sample data and compute the test statistic
Calculate the critical value and/or the $p$ -value
Make a decision

$\phantom{0}$
To illustrate the concept of hypothesis testing, a $z$ -test will be used to investigate an example research scenario.
$\phantom{0}$

z-test

A $\boldsymbol{z}$ -test uses sample data to test hypotheses about an unknown population mean $\mu$ .

$\phantom{0}$

1. Example: Research Question

A university wants to determine the effectiveness of a new Summer Course aimed at improving the statistical knowledge of its students. The students are graded on a scale from $0$ to $10$ , and from previous years it is known that the population of students currently has a mean grade of $\mu=6.5$ and a standard deviation of $\sigma=1$ .

In order to test the impact of the Summer Course, a total of $n=100$ students are randomly selected to participate in the Summer Course.