Design and analysis of 23 factorial experiments of variables affecting students’ academic performance

Abstract

In this paper, a 2³ factorial experiment is designed to examine the influence of such factors as teaching method,gender and level of study on students’ academic performance. The subjects were tested on effect of teaching method,gender and level of study on their academic performance. The data obtained from the experiment were analyzed using the Analysis of Variance technique of 2k factorial designs devised by Yates (1937), known as Yates Algorithm. In theanalysis process, the magnitude and direction of the factor effects were first examined to determine the likely important variables. It was found that each of the Level, Method, and Level-Method interaction effects has large impact on students’ academic performance while Gender and all the other interaction effects do not appear to have impact on students’ performance. The significance of these effects with large impact was then confirmed by the analysis of variance, which shows that teaching method, level of study, and level-method interaction, have significant
effects on students’ academic performance, at 5% level of significance, while gender and each of the other interactions have no effect on students’ performance.