Average growth vs treatment

Let's say you are running an experiment to see how light affects plant growth. You will expose plants to either light or dark environments, and measure their growth after a week. You have three volunteers, Ali, Beth and Cy who will each manage a pair of plants. So six plants in all.  Back to overview...

Entering your results like this:

This is a very traditional way to enter such results for graphing - it's simple, and can result in a bar chart of these average (mean) values like this:

However, it has some disadvantages:

• There is no indication of how results were distributed by volunteer. Maybe this also has an effect, but you can't see it.
• By already calculating the averages, you can't see a view of how all the results were distributed.
• You can't do any form of statistical analysis on this data

DataClassroom can do a lot of the work for you, calculating averages and displaying graphs with many points.

We'd recommend that you record your data as one observation per row in a table, with columns that show the characteristics of each observation (your variables).

See here for an explanation.