An intervention study was conducted on a group of 20 under- privileged children to see if environmental enrichment wouldimprove their intelligence levels. Ar the age of three years, the children who were all from impoverished and overcrovded homes, began the intervention program, attending a special non-residential day school in which particular emphasis was placed on the development of social and cognitive skills.The children attended the school for 4 days per week until they began inflant school. a) What is the hypothesis of the experiment? b) What is the independent variable? c) What is the dependent variable?
This study is designed to test the hypothesis that environmental enrichment among the impoverished ad underprivileged children can lead to an improvement in their IQ levels. This is why the 20 children who were from the underprivileged sector of the society were picked and subjected to a non residential school that was less crowded than their previous situations. This is a program that was initiated at the age of 3 and special attention was put on development of social and cognitive skills.
An independent variable in psychology experiment is the characteristic that is changed or manipulated in order to see the effect the manipulation has on the dependent variable . For instance, in this study, the independent variable is the environment under which the three year children are subjected to for a period of four days a week until they began infant school. This is the characteristic that was manipulated in the study in order to see if the change in the kind of environment that the children are subjected to can affect in any way the intelligence levels that they display thereafter.
Here, the three year olds were taken from an environment that was congested and of lower living standards, to special schools where they had better access to education. In general there was environmental enrichment for the 20 children