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Research Methods & Evidence-Based Practice Flashcards

7 cards from real CPT practice questions. Tap to flip, then mark Knew It or Still Learning — missed cards come back until you master them.

Read the first 7 Research Methods & Evidence-Based Practice flashcards as text

  1. A tutor applies an intervention shown effective in university lab studies to a community tutoring center. Which validity concern arises most?

    Answer: Ecological validity

    Ecological validity addresses whether findings from controlled lab settings translate to real-world environments like community tutoring centers.

  2. Which type of research question is best answered using qualitative methods?

    Answer: How do students describe their experience of test anxiety during tutoring?

    Qualitative methods are ideal for exploring meaning, perspective, and lived experience rather than quantifying outcomes.

  3. A tutor uses a pre-validated assessment and a self-created checklist to measure comprehension. Which tool is more likely to have established construct validity?

    Answer: The pre-validated assessment

    Pre-validated assessments have undergone systematic testing to confirm they measure the intended construct, unlike informal self-created tools.

  4. When a tutoring program report states 'students improved by 15 points on average,' a critical reader should also ask:

    Answer: What was the standard deviation and was there a control group?

    Without variability information and a control group comparison, it is impossible to determine whether the improvement is meaningful or due to normal growth.

  5. A tutor finds a peer-reviewed study supporting a reading strategy, but the study was funded by the company that sells the program. This raises concerns about:

    Answer: Publication bias and conflict of interest

    Funding source conflicts of interest can bias study design, analysis, and reporting, making independent replication especially important.

  6. Which measure best describes the spread of scores around the mean in a tutoring outcome dataset?

    Answer: Standard deviation

    Standard deviation quantifies the average distance of individual scores from the mean, indicating how spread out the distribution is.

  7. A tutor reads that a study's results were 'statistically significant but not practically significant.' This means:

    Answer: The finding is real but too small to matter meaningfully in practice

    Statistical significance only indicates that an effect is unlikely due to chance; practical significance (effect size) determines whether the effect is large enough to matter.