Okay, soooo...
Let’s define some vocab terms first.
Independent Variable: What you change during the experiment.
What do you noticed that changed through out the experiment? Well, one group had calculators and the other group did not. Therefore, we can say that the calculators were our independent variable.
Dependent Variable: The result of the independent variable. “Wait, what? What the heck does that even mean?!” It does sound like a mouth full, but it really isn’t too complicated. Think of it this way: it depends on the change. Because you gave one group calculators and the other group no calculators, what will change? The speed of solving the problems!!
Basically, because you gave the group calculators you changed how fast they would have solved the problems without the calculators. So the dependent variable in this scenario is the time it took for the students to solve the problems.
Control Variables: The variables that stay the same for each group; they don’t change throughout the experiment. We can see that both of the groups were made up of 7th graders. That’s a control variable. We also see that both groups were solving integer problems. That is also a control variable.
I hope this helped you!!
