Toolpak. And if I am not able to make these graphs on Excel for some reason or am not able to get the Analysis Toolpak, I have found a couple of websites that can help me with making graphs online. This is a link to the histogram generator. It can not get easier than this people! All you have to do is put in your data points and how frequently they occur. And get this, the graphs appears instantly on the same page. Isn't this everything you've wanted in life? To be able to make a histogram online? <-- I am just kidding about that. But seriously, this is a really good and easy tool to use. Another awesome website that I found was for a box plot generator (Click here for the link). This is pretty cool as well. The same thing goes for this as it did for the histogram generator. All you have to do is put your data in the spaces given and bam! You have your very own boxplot. Is this amazing or what?I emailed all the schools that I wanted to be a part of the survey a sheet which had my background information on it and it also had the survey that would be given to the students to complete. This is what I sent in the email to the senior sponsors or counselor:
"Hello. My name is and for my AP Statistics class, I have to do an experiment. I chose to see how many
minutes on average seniors spend doing homework each school night. This project is equivalent to a final exam and will be counted as a big percentage of my final grade. I have attached the worksheet for you to give to your seniors. You can mail me back all the worksheets that you get from the seniors. Thank you so much for your time. I greatly appreciate this! Please feel free to email me with any questions or concerns that you may have."
This is the survey that I attached to the email for the sponsors or counselors to give to their students:
I am a senior and for my AP Statistics class, I have to do an experiment. I chose to see how many minutes seniors in Jefferson Parish spend doing homework each school night.
How much time on average do you spend doing homework each school night?
________________________Hours __________________________ Minutes
The only thing I am afraid about the results of these surveys is the fact that people might lie in this survey. They might either say that they spend more time to make themselves sound smarter. They can also lie by giving lesser time than they actually spend on homework because they do not want to sound like nerds in front of their friends.
On Monday, I emailed everyone the information that I needed from them. Some of the teachers I was able to talk to but for others that were in testing, I got their email address and emailed them. When I spoke with the different schools, I had to come up with a script as to what I was going to say. This way, I was able to gather all my thoughts together beforehand and wasn’t confused when I was actually talking on the phone. Only one school said that they would not be a part of this survey. Other schools have not yet sent me their data, nor have they emailed me with any concerns. The school that decided not to be a part of my survey will have impact on my overall project, because my experiment might start to become response biased. The response bias is due to the fact that only the schools that feel their students do homework each night are more likely to participate in the survey. I need to consider, however, how I will be putting this data together. For starters, I will use an Excel spreadsheet to put all the data in. Then, to make different types of graphs, I will use this website. On this website, I have the option of making different graphs including pie charts, bar graphs (which I can later make into histograms), line graphs, etc. I will start to put the data that I have collected from my school on the Excel spreadsheet and start making a histogram for the data for my school. By doing this, I will know what kinds of numbers I am expecting. This will also help give me an estimate of the average number of minutes that seniors spend on doing homework on a school night. But I have to make sure that I do not let the data from my school interfere with my thoughts about the data I will get from other schools. If I do this, it would be considered a form of bias because I might think that some observations are outliers, when in fact they may be very useful data.
Here are the definitions of the graphs that I will be using for my interpretation of the data: A histogram is “often used in exploratory data analysis to illustrate the major features of the distribution of the data in a convenient form. It divides up the range of possible values in a data set into classes or groups.” It is almost like a bar graph, but instead of categorical data, a histogram displays the frequency of numerical data. The graph on the left is an example of a histogram that I made in my Statistics class earlier this year for a Pi Day Project. We had to determine if the digits of pi could be used as a random number generator. We came to the conclusion that it can indeed be used because the probability of each number occurring is very close to .1 or 10%. For more information about this, you can visit my teacher, Mrs. Blanchet's blog. A box-plot, also known as a box and whisker plot, is a “type of graph which is used to show the shape of the distribution, its central value, and variability. The picture produced consists of the most extreme values in the data set (maximum and minimum values), the lower and upper quartiles, and the median. An ogive is similar to a histogram, but instead of displaying individual frequencies, it displays the cumulative frequencies. And a stem plot is “similar to a histogram but is usually a more informative display for relatively small data sets… It provides a table as well as a picture of the data and from it we can readily write down the data in order of magnitude, which is useful for many statistical procedures… By using a back-to-back stem plot, we are able to compare the same characteristic in two different groups.” I got all of these definitions (except for ogive) from this website.
means. Also within this link, there are many other statistical terms that you may not know the definition of. This link was very useful for me because it explains the term in depth and for the terms that I knew but forgot, this was a review. Back to gathering the data; well, I was able to get in touch with two of the schools via phone, but one school I had to email. I told each of the schools to give me back to data by mail by Friday (tomorrow). This means that they if they postmark the one-question survey that I have asked them to give to the students by tomorrow, I should have my data by Monday. I asked them to send it to my school because it will be easier for me to get my data rather than it being delivered to my house and then me having to bring it to school. I am really glad to know that my project is on its way and it is finally getting somewhere. I am planning on calling other schools that I was not able to get in touch with tomorrow during class. One of the reasons that some schools did not answer was because they were conducting standardized testing and could not be disturbed. Hopefully when I call them during my Statistics class, they will be able to talk with me and I can tell them all about my wonderful project! :)
I just went to read the blogs of other students in my AP Stats class. [I have attached links to the blogs of other students on the right of this blog.] They are really good! Each experiment is unique and it will take a lot to do these projects and get all the information, especially with all the things that are required of us. This project is a really good idea because we actually get to explore the community in math class -- now that's something that I though I would never do! I am really looking forward to gathering my data and also seeing what kinds of data other people are gathering. I guess I finally understand what people mean when they say that the world is just waiting for people for explore all the opportunities.
For this blog entry, my teacher asked us to answer three questions: Who is this data going to be useful for? How are we going to get the word out? And why would our topic be interesting to others? For starters, this data is going to be useful for many people, such as, educators, parents, students, and the numerous people that are in the education field. This will be useful for educators because they will actually get to see how many minutes of homework students get each night combined. This might actually influence teachers to take a moment to think about how much homework it comes out to be when homework is combined from all the classes. This will be useful for parents because they will get to see in numerical data how many minutes of homework students get all across Jefferson Parish. This can either mean that their child is getting less homework or more homework than other students. This goes same for the students. This data will be useful for the students because they will get to see how many minutes students their age spend doing homework each school night. This data is useful for pretty much everyone in the educational field because homework is the source of practice for students but if they get too much, some students just decide not to do it. Keeping this in mind, these educational officials will see how many minutes seniors spend doing homework each night. Now that I know who this data is useful for, how do I get the word out to people? Well, I will contact my local newspaper and ask them to publish this story and if explain to them why the community would care for this experiment that a simple high school senior did. Also, why would other in the community care for this experiment? They would be interested in this because it shows how much homework the leaders of the future get. I understand that homework is good for practice, but if students get too much of it, it gets tiring. With this project, the community would be made aware of the amount of time seniors spend on homework. If they are really into this experiment, I would have my contact information so that they can ask me any questions they have. 
So basically, we had to write a data analysis toolbox before we could start collecting our data. The questions that we had to answer were: Who are the individuals described by the data? What are the variables? In what units is each variable recorded? Why were the data gathered? When, where, how, and by whom were the data gathered? In addition to answering these questions, I had to write what graphs I will be using to display my results, what numerical summaries will be used and how I will be interpreting my results. All of the students in my class had to submit a data analysis toolbox and get it approved by our teacher before we could start collecting data. For starters, all of us thought that our toolbox was the best and nothing could be better, but when we got them back, we were all sadly mistaken. Our teacher did not even give us a grade for it because that is how bad they were. We were given a grade on work ethic. What our teacher intended us to do was to make this our reference for the rest of the project. With this toolbox, we would not need any other notes for the project because this would contain all of the information. I, along with other students, did not know this beforehand so all of the data analysis toolboxes that were submitted were very general and did not contain much detail. Once I knew that was what she wanted us to, I got to writing. I added a table with the names of all the schools that I will be contacting for my survey and I also added in that table the number where they could be reached along with what side of the river the school was on: East Bank or West Bank. Also, I detailed every aspect for the explanations of my graphs and how I will be interpreting them. While I was writing this, believe it or not, I was getting a deeper understanding of what I was actually looking for. In my first draft of the data analysis toolbox, I did not have any interpretation of the graphs in the context of my experiment. With the revised version, I wrote exactly what I was looking for and also other things that I would be looking for in those graphs. I really hope this is what my teacher was looking for. 
Check this link out to a blog that a parent wrote about the hours of homework students spend each night. And basically, he does not want students to have so much homework each night. I FULLY agree with this!!!!!!!! In his blog entry, he states that doctors base their treatment of their patient based on the patient's condition, and not based on their knowledge of science and medicine. Of course having a science and medicine background allows their judgment to be better, it is not as effective as the gut feeling a person may have. Christopher, the author of this blog entry, also gives a schedule of an average teenager. He states that 12 hours are spent to maintain a good health. This is half of our day. Then, about nine hours is spent on structured activities, such as, time spent at school, time spent commuting, and then the time spent on extracurricular activities. Now, the total is twenty-one hours. This only leaves three hours for the person themself. And you can’t forget that the human race is not perfect and there can be some distractions, which can extend this time. The student still needs to be relaxed in those three hours, have time for maintaining their hygiene and some other personal things. If teachers were to assign three hours of homework each night, the student would not have time to do anything else and would be grounded in work. This is not healthy for the child and teachers should keep in consideration the schedule of students outside of schools and assign an adequate amount of homework.
In the modern technology world, everyone is using blogs to write about their personal lives or just to communicate with other people. But, not all blogs are, in the words of my statistics teacher, “hot”. For a blog to be considered “hot”, it has to way the person writes has to stand out to the reader. Like, the author of the blog has to be personal and interact with the reader through the writing style. So to check out what other people have on their blogs, I searched up blogs on blogger. I found some interesting blogs, some boring blogs, and some blogs for which I have no words for. The last ones that I mentioned were a bit … interesting … :) Basically, what I saw in most of the blogger blogs were in different languages. That really shows the diversity of blogger blogs. Those blogs seemed more interesting than those that were in English because they had more pictures and they just seemed “hotter”. There was this one blog that I loved! It was really interesting because it had a bunch of pictures. This blog was entitled “Unshelved Words.” This blog had descriptions to go along with the pictures that the author wrote. That was something that seemed “hot” to me! My teacher assigned this blog as a project and she wants us to associate a picture with each of our blog entries. That’s what I have been doing, but this blog has helped me to consider adding more pictures. As everyone has heard, pictures are worth a thousand words and it would take too much time to write everything down. Also, pictures make everything else more interesting because most people are visual learners and enjoy looking at pictures and understanding a concept rather than reading a description of it. Here is a link to the awesome blog. Hope you like it and I hope you like my blog too. 
ata are a box-plot, histogram, an ogive, and a two-way table. I will make three types of box-plots, histograms, and ogives, which will display all of the data, just east bank data, and just west bank data. This way, I can easily compare the east bank to the west bank. I will construct only one two-way table which will show east bank data on one side and west bank data on another side. Once I get all of my data, I will graph it and analyze the data and I will definitely post all of my results on this blog. :)
Question:What is the average number of minutes a high school senior spends on homework on a school night?
Objective:
The objective of this project is to find out the average, or mean, number of minutes that students across Jefferson Parish spend doing their homework on a school night.
Materials:
- A letter of request for the high school counselors
- A valid email address that I can use to email others
- Email addresses or contact information for each of the high school counselors of the schools I wish to collect data from
- A computer on which I can record the data electronically
- A computer with Microsoft Office that I can use to analyze the results of the data collected
- A storage device, such as my flashdrive
- A TI-84 Plus Silver Edition calculator for all the computations
Subjects:
The subjects for this experiment will be high school seniors – students that are in the 12th Grade.
Procedure:
Write a small letter of request for the high school counselors asking them to ask the seniors at their high schools how many minutes on average they spend doing homework each night. In this letter, I will indicate how important it is for me that they gather this information properly since it will be presented to the public. Also, I will ask the counselors to tell the students to be as honest as they can, for this is an anonymous survey and the correct analysis of results can only be computed when the students tell the truth of the number of minutes they spent doing homework on a school night. I will set a time limit, possibly a week, in which I will ask the counselors to mail, or email, me all the number of minutes each student said he or she spent doing homework. Next, when I have all the different observations from the different schools, I will put that information in an Excel document so that I can have all of the data electronically. Then it comes time to actually analyze the data and interpret the results. The data will be analyzed using the various techniques that we learned in the Statistics class. Some of those include a box plot, cumulative frequency chart (or an ogive), a histogram, two way table, etc. Some of these will be constructed using my handy-dandy calculator, whereas other will be constructed using online tools. Since these are graphical displays only, I will have to write a paragraph or two explaining what each of these graphs tells. Of course I will put all of this information on my blog. :)
I have two college classes, an AP Class and a class that is based on a project, known as Digital Portfolio. Every night, I have tons of homework each night. And the homework is not all from the textbooks either. It is a combination of textbook problems, essays, a website and homework from an e-book. On average, I would guess that I spend about 2 to 3 hours doing homework each night. And it is not the fact that all of the work that I get is hard; it is actually quite simple. The only thing is that it is tedious and takes time. If I do take shortcuts, it does not help much because doing all of the work is more beneficial for later use. Since I have all of this work, I am curious to know as to how much time other students my age spend on their homework each night. So I came up with this research question: How many minutes do high school seniors spend on average each night doing their homework?
