At a professional academy, an introductory course in micro-electronics uses a personalised system of instruction in which each student views a videotaped lecture and is then given a programmed instruction text. The students work independently with the text until they have completed the training and pass a test. A concern is the varying pace at which the students complete this portion of their training programme. Some students can cover the programmed instruction text relatively quickly, whereas other students work much longer with the text and require additional time to complete the course. The fast students wait until the slow students complete the introductory course before the entire group proceeds with other aspects of their professional training. A proposed alternative system involves use of computer-assisted instruction. In this method, all students view the same videotaped lecture and then each is assigned to a computer terminal for further instruction. The computer guides the student, working independently, through the self-training portion of the course. To compare the proposed and current methods of instruction, a new class of 122 students was assigned randomly to one of the two methods. One group of 61 students used the current programmed-text method and the other group of 61 students used the proposed computer-assisted method. The course completion time in hours was recorded for each student in the study. The following data are provided in the data set TRAINING. Prepare a managerial report covering the following:

1. Use appropriate descriptive statistics to summarize the training time data for each method. What similarities or differences do you observe from the sample data?

2. Assess the evidence as to whether the average training time for the current method of instruction is different from that for the proposed method? Use both parametric and non-parametric techniques.

3. What other aspect(s) of the data do you think it would be useful to submit to hypothesis testing?