The main weakness of our study is the sample size of our study. We are talking about all athletes but we only used the track and field teams. While the track and field teams are the largest in the high school, they still don’t make up for a large percentage of the athletes in the high school. We didn’t have any non-response bias because everyone answered the questions. But there is a chance of response bias because the athletes could have answered untruthfully about their grades. This might attribute to the difference in the higher mean for the boys because they tend to be more competitive. Some confounding variables in the study could be that practices could last longer for the boys or girls, so they have less time for homework, which could caused for a higher GPA. Also, if one of the genders works more than the other, this would give them less time to study, leading to lower grades.
If we were to extrapolate to a larger population size we could extend the study to all athletes in the school, and perhaps even other schools. We would feel comfortable extrapolating our study to all athletes in our school rather than adding other schools. We would feel less comfortable accepting grades from other schools because their school could have easier courses and the information could be skewed. In result sticking to one school would produce the most fair and best data.
To continue on with this study someone could perform the study over many years and compare the data to see how the athletes are performing in the classroom compared to previous years. With this information we could find out of athletics would begin to take precedence over schoolwork, or if athletics contributes to discipline in the classroom.