Assessment, Statistics, and Research

Independent Samples t- test Researchers use the independent samples t -test to find out if there is a significant difference between two sets of data. In the behavioral sciences, the data are often two sets of scores on tests or survey items. Significance can mean a lot of different things. In behavioral science, it is common to think of significance as a frequently occurring, and thus reliable, difference. Sometimes the language of statistics can be confusing. The independent sample t -test evaluates the differences between the arithmetic mean s of the two groups of scores, and assumes the scores are normally distributed . Usually, a difference needs to be at least large enough that a score difference as large, or larger than the one obtained, occurs only 5% of the time by chance. The calculations are usually done in spreadsheets like Excel or Google Sheets or in a program like SPSS . See the link below for a download about how to calculate a t-test. You wil