For this blog entry, my teacher asked us to answer three questions: Who is this data going to be useful for? How are we going to get the word out? And why would our topic be interesting to others? For starters, this data is going to be useful for many people, such as, educators, parents, students, and the numerous people that are in the education field. This will be useful for educators because they will actually get to see how many minutes of homework students get each night combined. This might actually influence teachers to take a moment to think about how much homework it comes out to be when homework is combined from all the classes. This will be useful for parents because they will get to see in numerical data how many minutes of homework students get all across Jefferson Parish. This can either mean that their child is getting less homework or more homework than other students. This goes same for the students. This data will be useful for the students because they will get to see how many minutes students their age spend doing homework each school night. This data is useful for pretty much everyone in the educational field because homework is the source of practice for students but if they get too much, some students just decide not to do it. Keeping this in mind, these educational officials will see how many minutes seniors spend doing homework each night. Now that I know who this data is useful for, how do I get the word out to people? Well, I will contact my local newspaper and ask them to publish this story and if explain to them why the community would care for this experiment that a simple high school senior did. Also, why would other in the community care for this experiment? They would be interested in this because it shows how much homework the leaders of the future get. I understand that homework is good for practice, but if students get too much of it, it gets tiring. With this project, the community would be made aware of the amount of time seniors spend on homework. If they are really into this experiment, I would have my contact information so that they can ask me any questions they have. 
So basically, we had to write a data analysis toolbox before we could start collecting our data. The questions that we had to answer were: Who are the individuals described by the data? What are the variables? In what units is each variable recorded? Why were the data gathered? When, where, how, and by whom were the data gathered? In addition to answering these questions, I had to write what graphs I will be using to display my results, what numerical summaries will be used and how I will be interpreting my results. All of the students in my class had to submit a data analysis toolbox and get it approved by our teacher before we could start collecting data. For starters, all of us thought that our toolbox was the best and nothing could be better, but when we got them back, we were all sadly mistaken. Our teacher did not even give us a grade for it because that is how bad they were. We were given a grade on work ethic. What our teacher intended us to do was to make this our reference for the rest of the project. With this toolbox, we would not need any other notes for the project because this would contain all of the information. I, along with other students, did not know this beforehand so all of the data analysis toolboxes that were submitted were very general and did not contain much detail. Once I knew that was what she wanted us to, I got to writing. I added a table with the names of all the schools that I will be contacting for my survey and I also added in that table the number where they could be reached along with what side of the river the school was on: East Bank or West Bank. Also, I detailed every aspect for the explanations of my graphs and how I will be interpreting them. While I was writing this, believe it or not, I was getting a deeper understanding of what I was actually looking for. In my first draft of the data analysis toolbox, I did not have any interpretation of the graphs in the context of my experiment. With the revised version, I wrote exactly what I was looking for and also other things that I would be looking for in those graphs. I really hope this is what my teacher was looking for. 
Check this link out to a blog that a parent wrote about the hours of homework students spend each night. And basically, he does not want students to have so much homework each night. I FULLY agree with this!!!!!!!! In his blog entry, he states that doctors base their treatment of their patient based on the patient's condition, and not based on their knowledge of science and medicine. Of course having a science and medicine background allows their judgment to be better, it is not as effective as the gut feeling a person may have. Christopher, the author of this blog entry, also gives a schedule of an average teenager. He states that 12 hours are spent to maintain a good health. This is half of our day. Then, about nine hours is spent on structured activities, such as, time spent at school, time spent commuting, and then the time spent on extracurricular activities. Now, the total is twenty-one hours. This only leaves three hours for the person themself. And you can’t forget that the human race is not perfect and there can be some distractions, which can extend this time. The student still needs to be relaxed in those three hours, have time for maintaining their hygiene and some other personal things. If teachers were to assign three hours of homework each night, the student would not have time to do anything else and would be grounded in work. This is not healthy for the child and teachers should keep in consideration the schedule of students outside of schools and assign an adequate amount of homework.
In the modern technology world, everyone is using blogs to write about their personal lives or just to communicate with other people. But, not all blogs are, in the words of my statistics teacher, “hot”. For a blog to be considered “hot”, it has to way the person writes has to stand out to the reader. Like, the author of the blog has to be personal and interact with the reader through the writing style. So to check out what other people have on their blogs, I searched up blogs on blogger. I found some interesting blogs, some boring blogs, and some blogs for which I have no words for. The last ones that I mentioned were a bit … interesting … :) Basically, what I saw in most of the blogger blogs were in different languages. That really shows the diversity of blogger blogs. Those blogs seemed more interesting than those that were in English because they had more pictures and they just seemed “hotter”. There was this one blog that I loved! It was really interesting because it had a bunch of pictures. This blog was entitled “Unshelved Words.” This blog had descriptions to go along with the pictures that the author wrote. That was something that seemed “hot” to me! My teacher assigned this blog as a project and she wants us to associate a picture with each of our blog entries. That’s what I have been doing, but this blog has helped me to consider adding more pictures. As everyone has heard, pictures are worth a thousand words and it would take too much time to write everything down. Also, pictures make everything else more interesting because most people are visual learners and enjoy looking at pictures and understanding a concept rather than reading a description of it. Here is a link to the awesome blog. Hope you like it and I hope you like my blog too. 
ata 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. :)
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. :)
I have two college classes, an AP Class and a class that is based on a project, known as Digital Portfolio. Every night, I have tons of homework each night. And the homework is not all from the textbooks either. It is a combination of textbook problems, essays, a website and homework from an e-book. On average, I would guess that I spend about 2 to 3 hours doing homework each night. And it is not the fact that all of the work that I get is hard; it is actually quite simple. The only thing is that it is tedious and takes time. If I do take shortcuts, it does not help much because doing all of the work is more beneficial for later use. Since I have all of this work, I am curious to know as to how much time other students my age spend on their homework each night. So I came up with this research question: How many minutes do high school seniors spend on average each night doing their homework?
