Our Abstract The reason we did this study was to see if there was an association between favorite sport to play and procrastination level. We sample about 10% of ________________by distributing 150 surveys to randomly picked students. We had picked 75 girls and 75 boys to get an equal representation of gender in our study. Of those 150 surveys we received 115 surveys back. We noticed some weaknesses in our study which affected our results, please refer to our Discussion page. We also did a lot of background research on our topic and we learned a lot about procrastination and what we can do to reduce it, please refer to the Background page. We decided to use the Chi-Square Goodness-of-Fit test to see if we had an association between favorite sport and procrastination, but since we had 9 cells which had expected cell counts less than 5. After we ran our test, we were given a p-value 0f 0.585, so we failed to reject our null hypothesis, that there is no association between favorite sport and procrastination level. If we had a valid test and the expected cell counts were greater than or equal to 5, we would be able to support this study.

Our Purpose The purpose of this study is to determine if there is a relationship between a student's procrastination level and their favorite sport to participate in. The reason we intended to conduct this study was to see if the involvement in a sport raises the student's procrastination level. We conducted this study because we, the researchers, are very big procrastinators and we love to play sports. We noticed some relationship, but it will be interesting to see what happens in the end.

Background Research           We started our research by visiting our favorite search engine, Google. We first searched "Favorite Sport Survey" and clicked on the first link. For "Favorite Sports" survey results. http://teacher.scholastic.com/kidusasu/favsport/resfscbg.htm.

Then we wanted to know what procrastination really is and what effects it had, so we went back to our friend, Google, and typed "effects of procrastination" and we were given many sites. After reading through some of them, we stumbled across a website titled http://www.stopprocrastinatinginfo.com. On this website we discovered what procrastination really is. Procrastination is the act of putting off essential task until a later time, most of the time the non essential tasks are done before the critical ones. We then started thinking why do we procrastinate and the website says there are many reasons of this habit. For example, we may put things off because we don't enjoy doing these things. We may think if we can't do it perfect we may as well not do it at all. So now we know what procrastination is and what some of the reasons for it are, but what are the effects? On the website we navigated to the "Effects of Procrastination" page. We read about the various effects that procrastination has on our lives. It can affect our personal life and also our employment (that can affect the rest of our life). Procrastination can be very stressful which makes it unhealthy for your body and also for your relationships. Studies have been done that show anxiety may compromise our immune system which gives a greater chance for getting infections. The effects of procrastination is not just limited to stress, but can also effect your finances.

  We searched on Google again to see if there was a relationship or difference between who procrastinates more, males or females. I downloaded a PDF file which included a study of different reasons for procrastination and between males and females in school with their GPA. We went back to see if they had a study of just procrastination vs. males and females.             We did a new search and typed in “gender & school performance & procrastination” in order to see what the difference is between the genders, school performance (grades) and procrastination. So we went to our friend Google and it yielded us a site with the title “Tween time management: Personality, Gender & School Performance.” This was a study conducted by the Educational Testing Center in New Jersey. Their study was conducted on middle school children. They found that the indicated time management is much different than of adults. The study found that boys are more prone to less school performance and higher levels of procrastination because boys spend their time doing other various non-academic activities such as computer gaming, television, sports and the Internet. The author notes

That is, poor time management practices may lead boys to spending more time on non-productive activity (if gender differences in time management lead to gender differences in the use of time), or else the greater amount of time boys spend on leisure activities may lead to greater difficulty in time management. Gender differences in academic achievement . . . may be partially explained by gender differences in Planning and other such psychosocial factors/span> (p. 5 of the in press manuscript).              This shows that boys spend more time doing leisure activities which results in pushing things back such as important papers while girls spend their time writing these papers. We decided to stop our study after finding this amazing study on the topic that we were researching as it gave us a lot of important answers to the difference in procrastination and gender for us teenagers.

Our Study Our sample consisted of 75 randomly chosen girls and 75 randomly chosen guys. We obtained our sample by getting the master list of the students from our teacher, Mrs. Caso. Then we sorted the students by gender and put them into two separate spreadsheets. Then we used the sample from columns feature on Minitab and we randomly chose 75 of each gender resulting in a total sample size of 150 students. Our population of interest in this study was all the students who attended North Olmsted High School. Our sample consisted of an equal number of students from each gender and a variety from each grade.

Survey  1. On projects (any assignments lasting one week or more), when do you start the assignment: (circle ONLY ONE):             1 - Right Away             2 - In a Timely Fashion             3 - The Night Before             4 - The Morning of (before school)             5 - The Period Before             6 - Minutes Before             7 - The Day After it’s Due 2. What is your favorite sport to play? (Circle ONLY ONE):             1 – Football                     7 – Track             2 – Basketball                 8 – Baseball/ Softball             3 – Tennis                       9 – Hockey             4– Volleyball                   10 – Swimming/Diving             5 – Soccer                      11 – Wrestling             6 – Cross Country            12 - Other 3. Please circle your gender: MALE           FEMALE

Discussion   WEAKNESSES: There was some weaknesses with our study including non-response bias and response bias. Many students who we sampled attended Polaris or PESOP full time so that resulted in non-response bias. We had response bias because students had either forgot to circle their gender or favorite sport, or they circled more than one sport. We also had another weakness because the questions on our survey could have been worded differently. Some confounding variables in our study was the difficulty level of the classes the student was in and the amount of time a student spends on the sport rather than starting their projects. EXTRAPOLATION: The population of this High School is unique to _______ this high school and we don't feel comfortable expanding our study to other populations. FURTHER STUDY: If we were to do another study about procrastination and favorite sport to play, we would have to increase the population by sampling more students at North Olmsted High School.

Conclusion Since we had few cell counts less than 5, we are not able to say this study was valid, even though we still ran our necessary tests, chi-square test. When we ran the test we were yielded a p-value of .585. We failed to reject the null hypothesis at the 0.05 level of significance because the p-values >  α. Therefore, there is insufficient evidence to say that there was an association between favorite sport to play and procrastination level. .