WordPlay consists of 24 players who were recruited from a middle school 6th grade class. Since I only received permission from 1 six grade teacher this was the only exclusion for this experiment however once completed it will be open to all 6^th grade students.WordPlay includes both boys and girls from various different backgrounds. The ethnicities present in this experiment were Indian, spanish, creole, black, and middle eastern.

The subjects in WordPlay were broken up into three groups each containing 8 members to represent that group.  For example one group was the IEPs and within this group there were a total of 8 players who played the game in two rounds of 4 players in each round.The experiment was presented in the form of a game. The responses were measured based on how quickly and accurately the subjects responded and comparing exam grades for each group.The subjects were simply asked to play their best and no cheating in order to get real results.

The grades both before and after playing WordPlay was collected for each of the three groups to determine if there was an improvement in their memory.For each group I calculated the average exam grades both before and after playing WordPlay for each student.

For the ELLs the average exam grade before playing this game was 65.5%. After playing WordPlay the average was 70.5%. To calculate this I added all the grades and divided by the number of participants, in this case there were 8 in total. Next, I calculated the standard deviation by taking the sum of each value in the set minus the average, then squaring this number and dividing by the number of subjects (N), then,  calculating the square root of this number, which is 4.11 Finally I calculated the variance by  finding the square root  of  the standard deviation which is 16.86

I used this formula for all groups and the numbers are as follow. The average for the IEPs is 73.38 and 78.63 respectively.Standard deviation 4.07 and 2.50, the variance is 16.55 and 6.27 For the regular 6^th graders the average grade before the game was 85.5 after the game was 91.13. Standard deviation was 2.93 and 2.85 and the variance was 8.57 and 8.13 respectively.   I compared the average of each group before and after playing WordPlay by using the t test. To calculate the t test I used numbers that I already calculated such as average, standard deviation etc.  and plugged them  into a formula.

For the t test  which is used to reject or fail to reject the null hypothesis  I also needed to know the degrees of freedom which is computed by N+N-2, in this case  if was 14.Since I wanted to have a 95% confidence interval which is a value that is close to the true value I set my significance level to 0.05%.Using a t  test value table I  determined that my critical value is  – 2.15 and +2.15  and depending on the result from my calculations  I will reject or fail to reject the null hypothesis( H_o).For the ELLs t= 3.44, IEPs t=3.65 and regular 6^th grade t= 5.43. Since all scores were in the rejection region on the two tail bell curve I rejected the null hypothesis for all groups meaning there is a difference in these sets of data.

The overall average for the regular 6th grades were significantly higher than that of  ELLs.  This make sense to me because the ELLs had some difficulties understanding the concept of  the game. To resolve this I had them observe others  before playing.