Math 243
Project Notes
Your Statistics and Probability project will come in two parts. The first part will be a short paper detailing your design and your finding. The second part will consist of a short presentation to the class in which you will give an overview of your project. There is a wide range of data that can be used for your project. The type and source of the data you are working with should have a profound effect on the final feel of your project. The following is meant to give you a few guidelines of what should be included. If you have any questions about how, or if, any of these thing fit into your project please discus them with your instructor. Keep in mind that the following should not be thought of as inclusive. This is not meant to be a check list but a starting point from which you can take you project to where it leads.
Your Data: By default your data should either be quantitative or binomial. Non-binomial categorical data can be effective under some situations. If you have concerns that your data might not work ask your instructor for help. We can usually find a way. You will want to have between 30 and 100 data points for many of our techniques. Binomial data will sometimes require more. If you have a particularly compelling project idea and 30 data points are not available discus options with your instructor. There are techniques specific to small data sets that can be used.
The Paper: Your paper should explain the three aspects of a statistical activity; design, description, and inference. Design; You should be detailed about what the data is that you are collecting, what the population is that you are studying, and how you are going about gathering that data. Your should tell your reader what type of data it is, what type of study, where bias might affect your data, what you did to address that bias, and what you would do differently to avoid that bias in a second study. Description; describe the data you collected and display your data in appropriate ways including graphs, histograms, charts, descriptive statistics, and anything else that would help your reader get a feel for the data you have collected. Inferential; using the techniques from chapters six and eight you should be explaining relevant finding about your data. This should include probabilities from chapter six as well as confidence intervals from chapter eight along with any other tools needed to explore your data. Your paper should start by posing a few relevant questions and end with the answers to those questions, or why what you did failed to get the answers and how a new study would fix the problems. The paper should include you major calculations within the text. You may want to augment your paper with an active excel document.
The Presentation: The goals of the presentation mirror those of the paper. You will want to explain your design, description and inferential stages to the class. This should include several effective visual aids, as needed. The main difference is that your presentation will be less detailed and not show your calculations. You will be assuming your viewers understand how to find a confidence interval for example. You do not need to show us. In addition you will want to include some appropriate background on your subject. This will help your viewer to understand what relevance your question has and how the answers fit in. Your finished product should not simply be a set of numbers but a context into which those numbers fit.