Abstract

    Our project deals with the rate of tardiness per day at NOHS.  We wanted to see if there was a different amount of students tar per weekday.  Mrs. Stanko, the attendance office master, who has been working in the attendance office for quite some, time predicted Monday would be by far the day with the most late students.  We obtained the attendance lists from Mrs. Caso, and recorded the data on Minitab.  Then we started our background research.  We were pretty unsuccessful, only finding results regarding school policies on tardiness.  Disappointed, we proceeded.

    Initially, we were going to sit out by the attendance office and count the late comers for a two week period, but Libby had a better idea.  Since we were seniors and had prom we decided we couldn't sit out by the office enough days to complete a study, so we used the old attendance lists Mrs. Caso had provided.  This was a better way to obtain the data because it spanned out over a longer period of time, the entire third quarter.  However, during the winter months of third quarter, we had a few snow days, and many days with a lot of snow, causing difficult driving conditions.  Students were more likely to be late on days there was a lot of snow, an extraneous factor we discovered.  For example there was one Tuesday in February where 76 kids were late.  This observation was an outlier and had a huge impact on our significance test, so we computed a goodness of fit, both with, and without the outlier.  With and without the outlier, we rejected the null hypothesis.   Therefore there was significant evidence to say that there was a difference in day to day tardiness. 

A statement of the problem

The purpose of our project is to determine if the rate of tardiness at North Olmsted High School differs from day to day.  We want to find out if there are certain days of the week where more people arrive tardy to school.  We decided to choose this subject because Libby is always late to school, and it was often only on certain days of the week.  She wondered if a majority of the other kids that were late to school also had that problem.