You are trying to decide whether you should purchase paper copies of the textbooks required for your courses next semester or purchase the online copies of the texts that are much cheaper. You are...

You are trying to decide whether you should purchase paper copies of the textbooks required for your courses next semester or purchase the online copies of the texts that are much cheaper. You are concerned that with the online texts, staring at the computer screen may be too distracting because you also receive texts and instant/chat messages on your computer. To help you make this decision, you look at the research done on paper versus computer text reading. You find a study that had participants read two passages about two different topics. Each participant read both passages, one as a paper copy and one on the computer screen. After a distractor task lasting 30 minutes, the participants were tested then for their comprehension of the passages with a multiple choice test containing 10 questions about each passage. Their scores were then input into SPSS and a paired samples t test was conducted. Use the SPSS output in Figure 10.6 to answer the questions below.

a. What is the sample t score for the difference scores?

b. What is the p value for the sample t score?

c. Assuming the researchers used an α = 0.05, what does this test tell you about comprehension of paper versus computer text? Does this help you decide which types of texts you should buy? Why or why not?