FOR Males compared to females
Is it really true?
Created by Alyssa Lawrence and Bryan Beatrez in the spring of 2011.
Abstract
The purpose of our study was to determine if there is a difference in the academic preference of high school male and female students. We have heard about this common stereotype, but we wanted to see if it is really true for high school students. Our population of interest was all students currently attending North Olmsted High School. Our sample consisted of 75 randomly selected male students and 75 randomly selected female students. After sending out the 150 surveys, we received back a total of 110, which we entered into Minitab.
Our background research consisted of visiting a variety of websites using Google as our search engine. All of these websites had data to back their conclusions. Most of these sources agreed that boys like math & science and girls like English & social studies. However, a bulk of this research was performed on elementary school students. Little data about high school students' academic preference exists. We were even more curious at this point to see if these conclusions could also be applied to high school students.
After entering our data into Minitab, we ran a two-way table for a chi-squared test. This test yielded a p-value of 0.001. With a p-value so low, we can reject our null hypothesis in favor of our alternative hypothesis at any reasonable level of significance. As a result, we concluded that there is a significant difference in the academic preference of high school male students compared to high school female students. This conclusion is valid because all of our conclusions for the chi-squared test were satisfied. First, we needed a simple random sample, which was obtained through the "Sample from Columns" function in Minitab. Second, we needed all of our expected cell counts to be at least 5. Looking at the graphs page, we can see that all of the counts are at least 5, indicating that our sample size is large enough.
