Project description
Statistical Tools and Graphing Assignment
This assignment is marked out of 20 but contributes 10% of the marks for this course.
Your Task
Pose an interesting question in which 2 sets of data are compared. This could be an opportunity to test a “myth”. Ensure that is not already obvious- eg whether boys are taller than girls, or whether running affects heart rate. The data must be suitable for analysing using a t-test.
Collect enough suitable data to answer the question, analyse it, and report your conclusions. Use a Word doc to set out your assignment (including graphs) and Excel to analyse your data and create graphs.
Introduction (2)
State your question and why you want to know the answer.
Method (4)
Describe how you collected the data. Save your data as an Excel file.
Data display and analysis (10)
Ensure that numbers have a sensible number of decimal places, figures are copied into the Word doc and have an appropriate title and legend (the legend should enable the reader to understand what the graph is about without having to read the text), the Excel worksheet(s) is named, and graphs are clear and easy to interpret.
Display your raw data on a suitable graph. Do a separate graph showing the means with MoE error bars. Use both a t-test and the 95% confidence interval for the true difference between the means to determine whether the means of the 2 sets of data are different.
In your Word doc, summarise your data in a table (APA formatted). In your Excel file, make sure it is clear how you did everything.
Conclusion (4)
Interpret your results to answer your original question. Include discussion about whether you ‘believe’ the result (ie does it make sense?), what the significance of the results is, any unexpected results or problems you may have had to resolve.
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Referencing Requirements:
TWO SAMPLE TEST EXERCISES
Computer work
Data summary with a pivot table. Prepare a summary table and format it APA style using the pulse project data base. Pages 2-5
Two sample t-test. Do a two sample t-test to see if exercise made a difference to pulse rates. Page 6
Hints for graphs and error bars in your assignment Page 7
Means chart with error bars. Do a summary of the pulse data, calculate the margins of error and draw a means chart with error bars. Page 7
Another two sample t-test. Use the pulse project database to do a new t-test which interests you. Page 7
Species richness and abundance. Species richness is how many different species are seen at a certain place. Pivot tables can’t count how many different sorts of things there are in a list. However, a (fairly) simple trick can help us.