Do you Pay Attention? Kara Bland 7th Period 5-28-10

Purpose To test is there a relationship between how much time is spent in a class not paying attention and the subject of that class. I wish to sample Kenwood high school students.

Sample Throughout the day one day I presented my project to random students in my classes and asked them to fill out the chart. The strengths of the study is that enough students were surveyed for enough data and the students grade levels were diverse. The weaknesses of the study is that the surveyors weren’t completely picked at random.

Procedure Math English Science 0 min. 6 7 15 10-20 min. 13 14 I present my question to the surveyors and ask them to fill out the chart. Some students didn’t have all the subjects I had listed on my chart, so the subject that they didn’t have I told them not to fill out a time for that subject. Math English Science 0 min. 6 7 15 10-20 min. 13 14 25-35 min. 11 10 5

Experiment Is there a relationship between how much time is spent in class not paying attention by Kenwood High School students and the subject of the class? Null: There is no relationship between how much time is spent in class not paying attention by Kenwood High School students and the subject of the class. Alternative: There is a relationship between how much time is spent in class not paying attention by Kenwood High School students and the subject of the class.

Experiment Cont. 31 Kenwood High School students. The formula used was the Chi-Squared Test of Independence The chi-squared test of independence is used when you have two nominal variables (Categorical Variables), each with two or more possible values. I chose a Chi-Squared Independence test, because I want to test if two variables have a relationship or not.

Experiment Cont. Since it is not known if the data comes from a SRS, we will proceed with caution. All counts are over 5 people. Chi-Squared= ∑(Observed-Expected)²/Expected= 11.21 Using the Chi-Squared Independence Test on the TI-83, P-value= 0.024

Experiment Cont. With such a small p-value of 0.024 and a alpha level= 0.05, I will reject the null hypothesis that there is no relationship between how much time is spent in class not paying attention by Kenwood High School students and the subject of the class; and conclude that there is a relationship between how much time is spent in class not paying attention by Kenwood High School students and the subject of the class.

Conclusion One strength was that I got a lot of kids to participate in the survey. A weakness is that not every student had a class in every subject. Because of that my total of the rows and the total of the column did not equal. The results could have been thrown off a little by this, but not to much. To improve my project next time I would have only students that have a class in all three subjects. Then I would randomly pick who would be in the survey by assigning numbers and then going through a random digit table.