This is the life :)

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 12^th 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. :)