What are we studying
For this project, the teachers conducted a survey for which we analysed and described student’s opinion and suggestions towards the uniform (categorical) and their preferred school times (numerical). We need this data so that the staff can apply suggestions and improve life at school for students.
The Validity and reliability of research methods used in this project
For this project, we received data from everyone who is in Year nine math, this includes year 8 students who are accelerated. The data given to us is convenience sampling as the test was made compulsory towards the participants (Year 9 Maths). As I stated the data includes accelerated Year 8 students, to make sure the data was reliable and valid they did not make any generalizations. This data may not be valid as it might include non-response bias. This may be because the participants got tired or bored as there were a lot of questions and, may have randomly priced answers even if they did not agree with them. Finally, our responses were completely anonymous (maintaining our anonymity), and did not use impartial language, this made sure that people were not feeling inclined to give “socially acceptable answers”.
Results
The range of the start time is 4 hours
Female data
Mean – 8.7 hours
Median – 9 hours
Mode – 8 hours
The interquartile range is 1.5 hours
Male data
Mean – 8.5 hours
Median – 8 hours
Mode – 8 hours
The interquartile range is 2 hours
Non-binary data
Mean – 9
Median – 9
Mode – 10
The interquartile range is 1 hour
Our Categorical Data
These are our other graphs for our categorical data. It is represented as a pie chart. In two of the graphs there are outliers, these being the number 42 in the girls and the number 50 in the boys. There are no outliers in the non-binary graph.
Numerical Data
Our Box Plots
Our findings
These were some of our findings over the 3 weeks we were conducting There are more male students on average than female students, which is shown in the male’s higher median. The female students’ graphs tend towards symmetrical as well as The males. For the non-binary people, it is hard to conclude whether it positively or negatively skewed as there is little data to go off making it an outlier. For two of the groups, they both had the same starting number of 7 and the other group started at the number 9.Something interesting about our data was that a lot of it was quite equal in numbers for both of our questions. That was very surprising for us.
Reflection on our work
Limitations:
Limitations of our work were mainly that there were year eights that did this survey, meaning that it was not just one group doing the survey so their opinions would be different to year 9’s.
Recommendations:
I recommend that next year there are: Have more options for the answers to the survey, Better wording of survey questions because some were hard to understand, Year 8’s did the survey could have affected the results, In the survey, we had a bias response as the survey was quite lengthy so make it shorter so people don’t lose interest by the end of it.
Experience with the task:
Our experience with this task was very good. It took us a little bit to get a grip of excel, but other than that everything was great. It was not only a serious task but it was also fun because we didn’t have to always sit doing lots of content and have to end up doing a test. All the data was set out very well so it was easy to read. It was also good to work with a partner and not always by yourself, we were able to split out some of the questions but also do some together. There were somethings that we found challenging, but I would do a project like this in the future.