Overview
For this final draft of your semester project, you will be revising your paper from Semester Project Part 3: Designing Your Study based on instructor feedback, adding relevant information from the modules you've completed since then (see below), and submitting the final version to demonstrate all that you have learned about statistics and the research process this semester.
As mentioned above and in the information provided after you submitted part 3, you will add to your study design details addressing the following new questions/sections:
- What population characteristic(s) will you be estimating (mean, median, standard deviation, proportion, etc.) and how (point estimate, interval estimate and confidence level, etc.)?
- What hypothesis test is appropriate for your study (if any)?
- What correlations will you investigate as part of your study (if any)?
- Based on what you have learned, is your original sample size still appropriate for your study? If not, what will you change it to and why?
- Any other pertinent information that is necessary for someone to understand your study and trust the validity of your study
- Add a conclusion that sums up your proposed study.
Your paper should:
- Describe your study in detail
- Be written in an organized manner using complete sentences.
- Be written for an audience who is familiar with statistics (though is not an expert) and has no prior knowledge of your proposed study or topic. A good way to think about it is writing as if you are trying to convince someone that your study is well-designed and deserves to be funded.
- Be 3-5 pages in length
Your paper should contain the following information:
- An overview of your study including your research question, whether your study is an observational study or an experiment, and the goal of your study
- A detailed description with explanations to all of the questions from Semester Project Part 3: Designing Your Study and the new questions included in this assignment (this means more than one word answers to all questions!) You should not include the questions in your paper, but should provide answers in proper context so that the reader understands that information about your study.
- Any pertinent information that is necessary for someone to understand your study and trust the validity of your study
- A conclusion that sums up your proposed study
EDIT COMMENTS TO MAKE FROM PROFESSOR:
There are a few inconsistencies in your discussion of Method and Study Design that you'll need to fix. In the Method section, you discuss that your population is high school students in the United States and that your sample will be 500 high school students in Massachusetts. But in the Study Design section, you state the population is high school students in Arizona and you don't address where the 500 students in your sample are coming from. I think it is best to have high school students in Arizona be your population if you plan to sample from just one state. And then your 500 students in the sample would also come from Arizona.I recommend you put your survey that starts on page 7 at the end of your Data Collection paragraph on page 5. Then you can actually take out most of the rest of pages 6 because it has already been included in the early parts of your paper. For the survey questions that have a range (like Always to Never, Daily to Never, etc.), I recommend attaching a number to each response so that you can do more numerical analysis (like finding an average). For example, if you attach numbers to the responses in questions 5 & 6, you could create a scatter plot of each one vs student GPA to see if there is a correlation. You could also compare the average GPA for students whose parents participate in school events or activities to those whose parents don't (based off question 7). There's not one right way to do this analysis, but you should discuss what you'll do with the data and how you will use it to answer your research question. After the survey, you should also include a section discussing what analysis you will do using the results and how you will use the data you collect to answer your research question.