Data Analysis

Basically, I am doing a research study on the seniors that attend a school in Jefferson Parish. For those of you who don’t know what a parish is, it is equivalent to a county of a state. Okay, so I want to know how many minutes students across my school district spend on homework each night. I want to see whether I am getting too much homework that is taking up my whole night, or are there students who are getting more homework than me? Since Jefferson Parish is divided into two sections, the east bank and west bank, I will be comparing the data of the two regions. My data will be measured in minutes, since I am asking students how many minutes they spend each school-night doing homework. So let’s find out some more information as to how I am going to be doing this. In the blog before this one, I stated the procedure that I will be using to collect this data. Once my teacher checks that I am going in the right direction with this project, I will write a quick memo as to why I need this data and send it out to the counselors of the different high schools. I plan on having all the data in need within the next three weeks because I need time to analyze the data and from a previous project that I have done in this class, I know that it takes a lot of time to do that. And of course, all the above mentioned will be done by yours truly: me. Now that I have all the data, what exactly am I going to do with it?? Well, for starters, I will have to calculate a numerical summary of the data. This numerical summary will include the minimum value, Q1 (the 25th percentile value which is the value where 75% of the data falls below), the median or middle value, Q3 (the 75th percentile value which is the value where 75% of the data falls below), the maximum value, the mean and the standard deviation. The graphs that I will use to display my data 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. :)

Experimental Design

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. :)