Hamilton AP statistic students collecting real-world data
Wednesday, March 16, 2005 6:00 pm
Hamilton High School Advanced Placement Statistics students have been applying their knowledge of statistics to come up with findings about their peers at school.
In tests of independence and homogeneity – known as Chi Square Distributions -- students investigated relationships among groups at their school. The following are their findings.
- Michael Miller — There is no relationship between a student’s gender and his or her favorite sport to watch.
- Jamie Sylvester, Jeff Stathus and Jenna Resch — Music preference is not related to cereal preference.
- Stepahnie Bronikowski and Stacy Strebel -- and in another survey -- Sarah Giuffre and Anita Loker — A relationship exists between gender and favorite color.
- Sara Mikolajczak and Ken Norby — Each grade at Hamilton has the same proportion of students with 0, 1, 2, 3 or more siblings.
- Nick Blaubach, Keith Meyer and Matt LeDonne — Preference of movie genre is not related to grade in class.
- Miranda Regall and Jenny Olson — A student’s gender is independent of grade point average.
Students compared data from two samples to reach the following conclusions:
- Jamie Sylvester and Jenna Resch — There is no difference between the number of hours Hamilton senior males and senior females work.
- Sara Mikolajczak and Ken Norby — Upperclass females at Hamilton do not have higher grade point averages than their male counterparts.
- Missy Haese and Laura Zoulek — Hamilton senior females do not have higher ACT scores than Hamilton senior males.
- Stephanie Bronikowski and Stacy Strebel — There is a larger proportion of Hamilton juniors than seniors who chat online at least five nights a week.
- Michael Xiong, Michael Miller, and Matt LeDonne — Hamilton male upperclassmen do not work more hours per week than their female counterparts.
- Nick Blaubach and Keith Meyer — Hamilton female upperclassmen have higher grade point averages from last semester than Hamilton male upperclassmen.
- Miranda Regall and Jenny Olson — The proportion of Hamilton female students who tan at tanning salons is greater than the proportion of Hamilton male students who tan at salons.
- Anita Loker and Sarah Giuffre — Male students at Hamilton do not work fewer hours per seven-day week than female students.
Students applied their knowledge of designing experiments by testing the following hypotheses. Statistics teacher Penny Komatz cautions that sample sizes were small and therefore the results cannot necessarily be generalized.
- Stephanie Bronikowski and Stacy Strebel — whether the wording of a question affects the responses given by a class of seventh graders
- Jenny Olson and Miranda Regal — whether Hamilton students can distinguish between a name brand potato chip and a generic potato chip in a blind taste test
- Laura Zoulek and Missy Haese — whether Hamilton students will rate chocolate chips in a Nestle Toll House bag higher than the same chip delivered in a Roundy’s bag
- Jamie Sylvester and Jenna Resch — whether students will rate the cereal in a Kellogg’s Froot Loops box higher than the cereal in a Malt-O-Meal bag, even though it is the same cereal
- Sara Mikolajczak and Ken Norby — whether students will prefer soda that is tinted red over the same soda that is tinted black
- Nick Blaubach and Keith Meyer — whether students can differentiate between regular and one-third reduced fat Pringles in a blind taste test
- Jeff Stathus — whether students would prefer generic frosted flakes presented in a Kellogg’s Frosted Flakes box over those presented in a Roundy’s box
In addition to conducting their own research, AP Statistics students crunched numbers and applied their knowledge of statistical significance to help summarize information gathered from the 2004 Hamilton District Community Survey.