Past exam of the mathematics course of the University of Cambridge / 2013 / iii / Paper 30 / 2 / e

The analysis of variance provides evidence of a chocolate effect both with day included ($F_{3,18}=3.9665$, p-value $0.02473$) and with day omitted ($F_{3,20}=4.039$, p-value $0.02133$). Because every chocolate–day cell has the same replication, balanced factorial orthogonality separates the two main effects; the chocolate row is meaningful despite being entered first.

The chocolate-only fitted group means are approximately $14.17,11.67,9.33,11.33$ boards for A, B, C, D respectively. Thus A has the largest fitted lecturing speed and C the smallest. Relative to A, the fitted differences are $-2.50,-4.83,-2.83$ boards. The printed individual Student t-tests give strong evidence for the A–C contrast (p-value $0.00245$); B and D versus A have p-values $0.08835$ and $0.05582$, respectively. Those latter contrasts are not significant at 5%, and the output does not test all other pairwise comparisons. Simultaneous claims would require accounting for multiple hypothesis testing.

There is little evidence of a day effect after adjusting for chocolate. A chocolate-only normal linear model is therefore a reasonable simpler summary, with residual standard deviation about $2.42$ boards and explained variation $R^2\simeq 0.377$. This is an association under the additive statistical model; a causal claim would additionally require an appropriate assignment of chocolate and checks of the regression residuals and possible interaction terms.