What is ANOVA testing, and how does it work?
ANOVA stands for Analysis of Variance if that helps. You might find it under F-test in your text book. It’s similar to a t-test in that you’re seeing if there’s a difference between groups. Only in an F-test, you’re testing differences between more than two groups simultaneously. Basically you’re determining if any one (or more) of the groups is significantly different from any of the other groups without increasing the likelihood of a false positive. Imagine running t-tests between 6 different groups (that would require 120 t-tests and likely some of those would register as “statistically significant” regardless of if there was an underlying difference in groups). The wikipedia article for F-test (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F-test) goes through a step-by-step example on how to perform the diagnostic that’s accurate. The basic theory behind the F-test is that there is variance between different groups caused by random
