TICK_TOCK

A Study of Tardiness

discussion

One weakness of the experiment is the fact that we obtained attendance/tardy data for only one quarter of the school year. An unfortunately, North Olmsted was bombarded with snow during the months of January, February, and March. With more snow this year then ever before, the weather had a huge effect on our study. Because the driving conditions were horrible, there were certain days when the tardy number rose up to 76 in just one day. Therefore, this experiment is not a good representation of the other quarters of the year because of the extraneous factor of weather was not controlled for. There is no actual confounding variable in this experiment, only minor extraneous factors.

We can extrapolate these results to the population of all the other public high schools in North East Ohio, because they are also subject to the unpredictable weather patterns of the region.

This study could have been blocked into grade level or gender, to see which groups contributed most to the tardy lists. Also, this study could have been done at other schools in the area, and for the entire school year.

Conclusion

We conclude that there is not a significant difference in the tardiness rates per weekday at North Olmsted High School. After obtaining attendance lists from Mrs. Caso, we conducted a goodness of fit test. Using a significance level of .05 we obtained a p value that was less than .0005. This gives significant evidence to say there is a major difference in tardiness rates by weekday.