17. Blanking out on Tests Many students have had the unpleasant experience of panicking on a test because the first question was exceptionally difficult. The arrangement of test items was studied for its effect on anxiety. Sample values consisting of measures of

“debilitating test anxiety” (which most of us call panic or blanking out) are obtained for a group of subjects with test questions arranged from easy to difficult, and another group with test questions arranged from difficult to easy. Here are the summary statistics:

Easy-to-difficult group: n
25,
27.115, s2
47.020; difficult-to-easy group:

n
16,
31.728, s2
18.150 (based on data from “Item Arrangement, Cognitive Entry Characteristics, Sex and Test Anxiety as Predictors of Achievement in Examination Performance,” by Klimko, Journal of Experimental Education, Vol. 52, No. 4).

Test the claim that the two samples come from populations with the same variance.