We want to know if a new way of teaching is better. So, we teach one group of students the old way (the control group) and another group of students the new way (the treatment group). We give both groups of students the same quiz and record the results (our data). We want to determine if our data provides statistically significant evidence that the new way of teaching (the treatment) is effective, i.e., does it raise the average quiz score?

The following short tutorial PDF explains how to do an independent-samples t-test using the statistics package R and how to report your results. At the end of the tutorial is an Appendix with a short introduction to using R.

The tutorial requires the following .csv data file (containing the data on the students). You can open this file in any spreadsheet (e.g., Microsoft Excel) or text editor.

The tutorial requires the following R script. It is a .txt file. You can open it in R (or any text editor).

You can download the statistics package R for free from:
https://www.r-project.org/