ABSTRACT
My project was designed to reveal whether or not the proportion of students who participate in English is the same as the proportion of students that participate in math. I was interested in finding out if the proportions differed significantly, showing that either English or math is subject to less student participation. Initially, I planned to survey 75 students from the entire school population. However, because our school is comprised of approximately 1700 students, I figured that it would be best to take a larger sample of 150 students (which became helpful due to the large amount of non-response bias). Before I commenced with the sampling, I used the internet to research projects related to my topic. This yielded very little relevant results, so I commenced with the sampling process. After randomly selecting students from a school name list on Minitab, looking up their schedules in Guidance, and collecting my sampling results, I returned once again to one of the illustrious Rm. 321 computers to tally my results.
The results of my observational study fell into several different categories which I compared the proportions of using a chi-squared test for homogeneity. The students sampled evaluated their rates of participation in both math and English in these five categories: never participate, rarely participate, sometimes participate, participate most of the time, and always participate. Then, I compared the proportion of each English participation category to the corresponding proportion of each math participation category. The chi-squared test concluded that the proportions did not differ significantly between English and math. Therefore, about an equal number of NOHS students participate in English as in math. Some extraneous factors that may have influenced my results may have been the large amount of non-response bias or peer pressure among students answering the survey.
statement of the problem
Throughout my classes, I have noticed that certain individuals struggle to pay attention. I wondered if their struggle had anything to do with the subject matter. Therefore, I chose to compare their level of participation in two classes of entirely different subject matters: math and English. Hopefully, the observational study will reveal that the mean participation rating for math students at NOHS differs significantly from the mean participation rating for English students. I will use a chi-square test for homogeneity to test the null hypothesis.
