ts on 5th grade, at-risk students' self-esteem, there is no research foundation for the formulation of a directional hypothesis. for this reason, the proposed study's research hypothesis was formulated as a null thesis. This null hypothesis may be stated as follows:
Research Hypothesis - The Educational Intervention Program will not be observed to significantly change students' self-esteem measurers from pretest to posttest.
According to Best (1981), the design that is selected for use in the proposed study may be classified as a one group, pretest-posttest design. Specifically, the self-esteem levels of at risk fifth grade students will be measured. The Treatment variable which is the Educational Intervention Program will then be introduced. After students have been through the Educational Intervention Program, their self-esteem levels will again be measured.
Best reports that despite the fact that this design is a pre-experimental, rather than true experimental design, it is used in a variety of educational studies where real-world circumstances introduce limitations that make it difficult to apply more stringent experimental procedures. In the case of the proposed study, time and financial constraints upon the investigator necessitate limiting this study only to at-risk fifth graders in a single school. Since there are only 15 of these at-risk students, it was felt that they all had to receive treatment and that the one group pretest-posttest was the best design given this requirement. It must be noted that the use of this pre-experimental design does mean that the study is open to the possibility of a testing effect (pretest measures sensitizing subjects to self-esteem issues and thereby producing any observed changes in self-esteem) and this possibility does constitute a limitation of the research design.
It has been pointed out that the Treatment variable (sometimes called the "independent variable") of the s...