Math 120 Project

This project will be your chance to use statistics to address something that interests you. The goal of this project is to give you an opportunity to use what you have learned in a real world situation. Also, you will hopefully learn more about the subject matter you are studying, as well as statistics. You will propose a project, collect data, do statistical analysis on the data you collected, and finally write up a conclusion to your analysis. You will have a lot of freedom on what you wish to do with your project, but you need to keep in mind what is practical, legal and plausible.

There will be 3 due dates involved with this project:

Due April 21: A project proposal that explains the question you intend to investigate. You will be expected to do a hypothesis test and a confidence interval; make sure to include exactly what your null and alternative hypotheses are and what α-level you are going to use and why. Make sure to clearly explain how you are going to do your sampling and what possible biases your sampling method may cause. Explain what you would do to fix these biases if you had a larger budget and some assistants. Also explain what tests you are going to use and what assumptions you have to make to use these tests. Finally, explain any other difficulties you might run into in the process of doing this project. This proposal must be approved by me before you start collecting data.

Due April 30: Some evidence that you have collected your data. This can be copies of surveys that have been filled out (you will need to keep the originals), a record of the procedure that has been done, or just a spreadsheet of all the information that you have collected.

Due May 11: The final project. It should include a final write up of the proposal (including any corrections I have given you) plus a record of the data. In addition, you need to include a final report. This should include your conclusions from your study as well as supporting calculations, graphs, and charts. You should go into detail about the problems you faced in doing the study and explain how reliable you think your final conclusion is. If there are any outstanding issues left after your study (which there almost certainly will be) you should explain what further study could be done to answer these questions. If you suspect any bias in your results, you should explain what could be done in a future study to fix that bias.

Think of all the written work you turn in on this project as being professional quality. You will be graded on your grammar, spelling, and clarity of explanation.