Guidelines for the First Project in COB 191



Guidelines for the First Project in COB 191

Spring 2010

Due Thursday, February 11th at the beginning of class

(Dr. Scott Stevens)

Purpose: The purpose of the assignment is to give you hands-on experience with collecting data, organizing it, and presenting it in a meaningful fashion by using the statistical tools that we have developed so far in COB 191. In addition to this, the exercise is intended to give you experience working with Excel, including creating graphs, making tables, using its built-in functions, and printing your results.

Honor code considerations: This project is to be completed by you alone. Except as indicated below, you may not receive any assistance on any part of the project. This unauthorized assistance includes (but is not limited to) help from parents, friends, fellow students, and other teachers. Permissible exceptions to this policy are as follows:

• You may have one or more other people help you in collecting your data. For example, if you are timing events, you may have a friend write down the time required while you watch your stopwatch. Having someone else gather your data on their own is not permitted.

• You may use any texts that you wish to help you understand the statistical tools or Excel competencies you need. This includes your textbook, library books, tutorials, or general online resources. You may not use resources customized to your needs, such as an “Ask the Expert” website where you submit questions. You may not use any materials from another student, including notes, spreadsheets, data, or project ideas.

• You may use any built-in Excel functions that you wish, and may use my templates on the website in preparing your report. (Be sure you don’t cut off the copyright information if you do so.) Aside from this, all of your Excel work must be done by you alone. Essentially, if anyone else touches the computer to modify your spreadsheet in any way, you’ve got an honor violation. If this isn’t clear, let me know.

• You are welcome (and, in fact, encouraged) to have someone proofread your paper and offer editorial suggestions on your writing. The content must be yours, but you can get help on the composition.

• Be sure your project has a cover sheet with your name, your section, your project title, and the honor pledge, signed. The pledge is

On my honor as a JMU student, I have neither given nor received unauthorized assistance on this project.

Signed___________________________________

Project Requirements: Your project must satisfy the following criteria:

• You must collect your own data. This may be accomplished by conducting a poll, conducting an experiment, making measurements or observations, or other appropriate matter. Getting data off of the web does not satisfy this requirement. If you take a sample, it need not be a random sample, but you may receive extra consideration if it is, and you tell me how you accomplished the randomization. Note that if you wish to gather your data through an online survey, is a good one to use, for free.

• The data that you collect must include at least two variables that are measured on the ratio or interval scale. These two variables should have at least the credible possibility of being related, since you are going to be creating a scatter plot to look for such a relationship. For example, recording number of miles per gallon a car gets and year of the car’s production would be reasonable. Year is an ordinal variable, miles per gallon is a ratio variable, and one might expect that newer cars get better gas mileage. If the data shows no such relation, that’s fine. On the other hand, choosing number of brothers and body temperature would seem pretty off the wall, unless you can present me a reason why you might expect a relation.

• Your data must include at least 50 observations for each of the variables above. You must include all of your raw data at the end of your report.

• Your project must include a frequency distribution and relative frequency distribution for at least one variable.

• Your project must include at least one histogram, one scatter plot, and one categorical chart (pie, bar, or Pareto). Be sure that you appropriately format and label the graphs. Remember you may use my online templates to help you in making your graphs. The categorical graph needs to be for a categorical variable, not a numeric one. The categorical variable may be based on one or more of your ratio variables. This was the case for my sample project. The histogram has to have classes that include more than a single numeric value. (e.g., “1 to 3” is a reasonable class; “2” is not.)

• Your project must include the descriptive statistics report for a variable on the interval or ratio scale. Whatever information from this report that is particularly relevant to your analysis should be included in your text as well.

• Your project must make coherent sense. By this, I mean that your experiment and write-up should be a sensible project. Think of a project that will naturally showcase the skills that you’re required to demonstrate. As an example of a bad project, suppose that I collected data on people’s eye color (which is fine so far), but realized that I also needed a ratio-scale variable, so I collected data on how many eyes they had and how many letters were in their first names…and then I made a scatter plot of number of eyes versus letters in their names. What is the point of all of this???

• You may find it difficult to generate one exercise that will use all of these tools. If you like, you can gather data on several related exercises to demonstrate your abilities in descriptive statistics. For example, you could do two different experiments on people’s ability to balance.

• Your project must be created in Excel and Word. Click on a chart in Excel, right click, choose Copy, then switch to your Word document and choose Paste. That will paste the image into the document. Right clicking on the image in Word will give you access to controls to format it—especially Layout. Similarly, you can highlight the descriptive statistics report in Excel, copy it, then paste it into Word. The document you print to submit to me should be created in Word. Keep all Excel spreadsheets that you used in creating your project. I may ask you to submit those sheets after I look over your project, and I’ll expect you to be able to get them to me within a day.

• Your document should be of professional quality. Make sure tables aren’t cut off, that items are well formatted, that your print quality is reasonable, that your paper is stapled, and so on.

• Your writing should be of professional quality. I have received some truly dreadful writing on these projects in the past. This semester, I am limiting you to at most 400 words of expository text. (My sample uses 273 words of expository text, to give you an idea. If you are writing on a less familiar topic, you may need a few more words to let your reader understand what you are investigating.)

You must tell me clearly and concisely how you got your data and what information your graphs and tables convey. There is no excuse for spelling errors, sentence fragments, incorrect capitalization, incorrect possessives, misused words, or awkward or unclear language. You may have another student (or the people at the writing center) review your writing and make suggestions. You may write in first person, if you wish, but write in a professional voice.

Examples:

Acceptable: One would assume that getting insufficient sleep would hurt a student’s academic performance. But how little is too little? I investigated this question by gathering data on 50 JMU students, asking them their college GPAs and the average number of hours that they sleep each night.

Unacceptable: When I’m not paying attention in class alot of times its because of the fact that I was up way too late the night before. That got me to thinking that there are probly alot of student’s who could do better in school if they just went to bed before like 4, in the morning. So I asked some people about their sleeping and their grades.

• Example of an “A” Project

Don’t do this one!

Bargains on Books

A Comparison of the Outpost and the JMU Bookstore

Noah Wunreel

COB 191, Section 4

Dr. Stevens

February 6, 2010

On my honor as a JMU student, I have neither given nor received unauthorized assistance on this project.

Signed_______Noah Wunreel__________________

[Note: This sample project was created by Dr. Stevens, but is based on a lovely data set gathered by a previous student, Jacob Barclay. I am grateful for his allowing me to use it here. Note how the text indicates that I understand the tables and graphs.]

It’s popular wisdom that prices at the Outpost are lower than those at JMU’s on-campus bookstore. To investigate the truth of this belief, I chose 50 textbooks at random and recorded their selling prices (for both new and used copies) at each of the stores. My raw data appears at the end of this paper.

The descriptive statistics table (Table 1) appears to bear out the conventional wisdom: the average costs for both new and used books are indeed lower (by about $2.50) at the Outpost. While the average price at the Outpost is less, the scatterplot of book prices at the two stores (Figure 1, on the next page) indicates that substantial savings on a text is rare. Virtually all points are extremely close to the equal price line of y = x.

That said, there is enormous variation in the prices of books for different subjects. The cheapest in my sample is $5.95 while the most expensive is $197.50. The distribution for new book prices at the JMU bookstore is suggested by the frequency distribution and histogram on the next page (Figure 2 and Table 2.) Note that the seven-category frequency distribution in gives a considerably different picture than the five-category histogram. Books costing between $60 and $90 are evidently fairly rare.

While my sample was taken rather arbitrarily, it does include a considerable variety of books, at least when considered from the perspective of course level. The only objection may be that about ¾ of my books were for 100 and 200 level courses and the remainder from upper level courses, as shown by the pie chart in Figure 3.

|Bookstore New |

|Cost ($) |frequency |relative |

| | |frequency |

|0 to 30- |10 |0.2 |

|30 to 60- |10 |0.2 |

|60 to 90- |2 |0.04 |

|90 to 120- |13 |0.26 |

|120 to 150- |5 |0.1 |

|150 to 180- |6 |0.12 |

|180 to 210- |4 |0.08 |

Table 2: Frequency and relative frequency for prices of new books at the Bookstore

Figure 2: Histogram of new book prices at the Bookstore

Figure 3: Pie chart of book levels (600 level is graduate work)

Raw Data

|Course # |Level |Bookstore New |Outpost New |Bookstore Used |Outpost Used |

|ACTG 678 |600 |$126.75 |$122.85 |$95.25 |$92.15 |

|ANTH 265 |200 |$26.00 |$22.95 |$19.50 |$17.20 |

|ANTH 305 |300 |$54.00 |$49.95 |$40.50 |$37.45 |

|ART 205 |200 |$12.95 |$12.95 |$9.75 |$9.70 |

|ART 210 |200 |$55.00 |$55.00 |$41.25 |$41.25 |

|BIO 114 |100 |$42.75 |$42.75 |$32.25 |$32.20 |

|BIO 124 |100 |$139.00 |$134.65 |$104.25 |$101.00 |

|BIO 224 |200 |$154.00 |$149.15 |$115.50 |$111.85 |

|CIS 484 |400 |$119.50 |$116.05 |$89.75 |$87.05 |

|COB 191 |100 |$118.50 |$106.20 |$89.00 |$79.65 |

|COB 202 |200 |$16.00 |$16.00 |$12.00 |$12.00 |

|COB 202 |200 |$95.00 |$85.40 |$71.25 |$64.05 |

|COB 218 |200 |$105.00 |$98.10 |$78.75 |$73.60 |

|ENG 299 |200 |$7.95 |$7.95 |$6.00 |$5.95 |

|ENG 302 |300 |$13.95 |$13.95 |$10.50 |$10.45 |

|ENG 410 |400 |$19.95 |$17.95 |$15.00 |$13.45 |

|FIN 355 |300 |$147.25 |$142.65 |$110.25 |$107.00 |

|FIN 371 |300 |$189.00 |$182.90 |$141.75 |$137.20 |

|MGT 340 |300 |$196.25 |$189.75 |$147.25 |$142.30 |

|MGT 365 |300 |$189.00 |$182.90 |$141.75 |$137.20 |

|MATH 231 |200 |$102.25 |$99.40 |$76.75 |$74.55 |

|NUTR 363 |300 |$112.25 |$108.90 |$84.25 |$81.70 |

|PHIL 340 |300 |$50.25 |$49.50 |$37.75 |$37.15 |

|PHYS 140 |100 |$197.50 |$191.05 |$148.25 |$143.30 |

|POSC 395 |300 |$81.00 |$75.00 |$60.75 |$56.25 |

|GBIO 103 |100 |$173.50 |$168.00 |$130.25 |$126.00 |

|GECON 200 |200 |$158.75 |$153.70 |$119.25 |$115.30 |

|GENG 236 |200 |$52.75 |$50.85 |$39.75 |$38.15 |

|GEOG 230 |200 |$134.75 |$130.70 |$101.25 |$98.05 |

|GEOL 110 |100 |$93.25 |$90.70 |$70.00 |$68.05 |

|GGEOL 102 |100 |$165.75 |$160.50 |$124.50 |$120.40 |

|GHIST 101 |100 |$113.50 |$110.20 |$85.25 |$82.65 |

|GHIST 102 |100 |$52.75 |$51.75 |$39.75 |$38.80 |

|GHTH 100 |100 |$109.75 |$106.60 |$82.50 |$79.95 |

|GHUM 102 |100 |$17.95 |$17.95 |$13.50 |$13.45 |

|GHUM 200 |200 |$22.95 |$22.95 |$17.25 |$17.20 |

|GMUS 203 |200 |$24.95 |$24.95 |$18.75 |$18.70 |

|GPHIL 101 |100 |$47.50 |$44.00 |$35.75 |$33.00 |

|GPHIL 120 |100 |$102.00 |$99.10 |$76.50 |$74.35 |

|Course # |Level |Bookstore New |Outpost New |Bookstore Used |Outpost Used |

|GPOSC 200 |200 |$48.75 |$44.95 |$36.75 |$33.70 |

|GPOSC 225 |200 |$24.95 |$24.95 |$18.75 |$18.70 |

|GPSYC 160 |100 |$158.00 |$153.05 |$118.50 |$114.80 |

|GREL 110 |100 |$58.75 |$57.60 |$44.25 |$43.20 |

|GSCI 101 |100 |$146.00 |$141.55 |$109.50 |$106.15 |

|GSCI 164 |100 |$152.00 |$147.20 |$114.00 |$110.40 |

|GSOC 140 |100 |$64.75 |$59.95 |$48.75 |$44.95 |

|GTHEA 210 |200 |$109.75 |$106.60 |$82.50 |$79.95 |

|GTHEA 210 |200 |$104.00 |$101.25 |$78.00 |$76.25 |

|GPHIL 120 |100 |$101.00 |$98.20 |$75.75 |$73.65 |

................
................

In order to avoid copyright disputes, this page is only a partial summary.

Google Online Preview   Download