Is there a significant difference between gender in partipation of extracurriculars in high school?

In high school, extracurricular activities play a large role in a student's school life. From sports like Football to clubs like the Academic Team, students have a plethora of extracurricular activites to choose from while in high school. Since North Olmsted High School offers many extracurricular activities, we were interested in doing a study related to extracurricular activities. After discussion, we decided to add gender as an area of interest into the study. Thus, we were ultimately interested in whether a difference in participation between genders existed in regards to extracurricular activites at North Olmsted High School.

Abstract

In our study this year, we wanted to determine whether there was a difference in the number of extracurricular activities girls and boys participate in at North Olmsted High School. In order to test the hypothesis, we created a random sample of 50 girls and 50 boys by placing the complete NOHS student roster into Minitab and doing a random sample. We then sent out the surveys and received roughly half of the responses back. In order to test our hypothesis, we ran a two-sample t-test. Since we don’t know the population standard deviation, a t-test was used. We put our data into Minitab and proceeded to run the two-sample t-test. Our null hypothesis was that µ1 - µ2 = 0 and our alternative was that µ1 - µ2 ≠ 0. µ1 was the mean number of extracurricular activities girls participate in at North Olmsted High School. µ2 was the mean number of extracurricular activities boys participate in. After running the test, we received a p-value of 0.012 which allowed us to reject the null hypothesis at a 0.05 significance level. Thus, we had significant evidence to say that the mean number of extracurricular activities girls participate in at NOHS is different than the mean number of extracurricular activities boys participate in at NOHS.