_____Find an article in a newspaper, magazine, or on the internet which makes a claim about ONE population mean or ONE population proportion. The claim may be based upon a survey that the article was reporting on. Decide whether this claim is the null or alternate hypothesis.
_____Copy or print out the article and include a copy in your project, along with the source.
_____State how you will collect your data. (Convenience sampling is not acceptable.)
_____Conduct your survey. You must have more than 50 responses in your sample. When you hand in your final project, attach the tally sheet or the packet of questionnaires that you used to collect data. Your data must be real.
_____State the statistics that are a result of your data collection: sample size, sample mean, and sample standard deviation, OR sample size and number of successes.
_____Record the hypothesis test on the solution sheet, based on your experiment. Do a DRAFT solution first on one of the solution sheets and check it over carefully. Have a classmate check your solution to see if it is done correctly. Make your decision using a 5% level of significance. Include the 95% confidence interval on the solution sheet.
_____Create a graph that illustrates your data. This may be a pie or bar graph or may be a histogram or box plot, depending on the nature of your data. Produce a graph that makes sense for your data and gives useful visual information about your data. You may need to look at several types of graphs before you decide which is the most appropriate for the type of data in your project.
_____Write your summary (in complete sentences and paragraphs, with proper grammar and correct spelling) that describes the project. The summary MUST include:
a. Brief discussion of the article, including the source
b. Statement of the claim made in the article (one of the hypotheses).
c. Detailed description of how, where, and when you collected the data, including the sampling technique; did you use cluster, stratified, systematic, or simple random sampling (using a random number generator)? As previously mentioned, convenience sampling is not acceptable.
d. Conclusion about the article claim in light of your hypothesis test; this is the conclusion of your hypothesis test, stated in words, in the context of the situation in your project in sentence form, as if you were writing this conclusion for a non-statistician.
e. Sentence interpreting your confidence interval in the context of the situation in your project
Are your data discrete or continuous? How do you know?
Decide how you are going to collect the data (for instance, buy 30 bags of M&M’s; collect data from the World Wide Web).
Describe your sampling technique in detail. Use cluster, stratified, systematic, or simple random (using a random number generator) sampling. Do not use convenience sampling. Which method did you use? Why did you pick that method?
Conduct your survey. Your data size must be at least 30.
Summarize your data in a chart with columns showing data value, frequency, relative frequency and cumulative relative frequency.
Answer the following (rounded to two decimal places):
a. x¯ =
b. s =
c. First quartile =
d. Median =
e. 70th percentile =
What value is two standard deviations above the mean?
What value is 1.5 standard deviations below the mean?
Construct a histogram displaying your data.
In complete sentences, describe the shape of your graph.
Do you notice any potential outliers? If so, what values are they? Show your work in how you used the potential outlier formula to determine whether or not the values might be outliers.
____Construct a box plot displaying your data.
Does the middle 50% of the data appear to be concentrated together or spread apart? Explain how you determined this.
Looking at both the histogram and the box plot, discuss the distribution of your data.
Sample Solution
