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.
