A psychologist designs a study to investigate the effect of diaphragmatic breathing on test anxiety. After recruiting test-anxious subjects, the researcher splits the group so that two equivalent groups are created

One group is taught the method of breathing and asked to use it before taking a verbal memory test, while the other group is not taught the technique. After scoring the tests and conducting a statistical test, the researcher finds that the group that received the training significantly outperformed the other group. In this design, the test scores for each group would be
A) an example of a correlational outcome.
B) the independent variable.
C) the dependent variable.
D) considered random.

C