Spatial by TEMPLATED

Purpose

It is a common assumption that seniors are more school-spirited than freshmen. As students who regularly attend sporting events, we have witnessed the great amount of school spirit that occurs at games. We decided that sporting event attendance would be an accurate representation of school spirit. Thus, we launched a survey regarding sporting event attendance to test whether this assumption is true. Is the proportion of NOHS Seniors who have attended at least one NOHS high school sporting event in the past school year greater than the true proportion of NOHS freshmen who have attended at least one NOHS high school sporting event in the past school year?

abstract

To investigate the contrast in school-spirit between freshmen and seniors, we relied on sporting event attendance as an accurate representation of it. To determine whether or not seniors are more school-spirited than freshmen, we obtained random samples of size 80 for each population (NOHS seniors and NOHS freshmen) through Minitab. Our survey asked for the student’s grade level, giving them the option to circle 9, 10, 11, and 12 so the respondents are unaware that they are being compared against only one other grade level. Our second question asked “Have you attended at least one North Olmsted High School sporting event in the 2016-2017 school year?” We ended up receiving 27 senior surveys and 51 freshman surveys. One of our sample sizes failed to meet the size requirement, which weakened our study. To test our hypothesis, we used Minitab to run a two-proportion z-test. P1 represented the true proportion of NOHS freshmen who attended at least one NOHS sporting event in the past school year, while p2 represented the true proportion of NOHS seniors who attended at least one NOHS sporting event in the past school year. Therefore, p1-p2 represented the difference between these two proportions. Our null hypothesis was that p1-p2 = 0 (the two proportions are the same). Our alternative hypothesis was that p1-p2<0 (the proportion of freshmen who circled yes was less than the proportion of seniors who circled yes). The test produced a z-score of -1.25 and a p-value of .105, so we failed to reject the null hypothesis at the .05 level of significance since our p-value was greater than alpha. We were not able to obtain convincing evidence that the true proportion of NOHS seniors who have attended at least one NOHS sporting event in the past school year is greater than the true proportion of NOHS freshmen who have attended at least one NOHS sporting event in the past school year.