This is the life :)

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.