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.
