Field Project

Summary:  Your field project will apply what you have learned about inferential statistics. You will formulate a question, plan your project, collect or find sample data, perform a hypothesis test to answer the question, and submit a written report. This represents about 20% of your course grade, and you may earn extra credit by presenting your project to the class.

Ideas

You should pick a question that matters to you, probably in your professional field of interest, or perhaps a cherished hobby. Finding it hard to get started? The following ideas from past projects may help, but be creative! Remember that originality is part of your project grade.

• Do people tip less than 15% in a restaurant where you are a server?
• Do students’ GPAs go up or down after they change programs?
• Is there a difference between the number of hours that TC3 men and women work at a job?
• Are prices lower at Store X than at Store Y?
• Do more than P% of students own a computer, have Internet access, believe a computer course should be required, etc.?
• Are couples who sleep in king-size beds more likely to get a divorce?
• Do women in traffic stops get out of more tickets than men?
• You could test almost anything having to do with preferences or activities — video rentals by day of week, preferred political candidate, class of car — against a reasonable model that you’ve come up with, or one you’ve seen published for some other geographical area.

(Colors of M&Ms are a class example, so don’t do a project about colors of candies unless it’s substantially different.)

Caution:  Make sure you’re doing inferential statistics. Remember Chapter 1? Inferential statistics is taking a known sample and testing a claim about the whole population. If data are known for the whole population, no matter how interesting, that’s descriptive statistics and it’s not material for a Field Project.

Plans for Your Project

In real life and in school, advance planning is the key to quality work. You have an excellent chance of a good grade on your project without sending your stress level through the roof if you plan ahead in this way:

• A couple of weeks before the project is due, you should come up with a one-sentence idea for your project. Drop me an email or chat with me in person to make sure it’s workable.
• Then, let me have your Field Project Plan as early as possible. Caution: The Field Project Plan isn’t a document you turn in for a grade. Rather, it’s a contract: you say what your project will be, and I assure you that it is acceptable. Like many contracts, it may need one or more rounds of negotiation before both parties agree to it, so allow time for those negotiations in email or in person. If you start the process on the last day, there probably won’t be time to complete those negotiations and get it approved.
• If you’re taking a survey, you may need to get an additional approval for your survey form. I can’t accept a survey project without the required approvals.

The Field Project Plan might seem like extra work, but how does it benefit you?

First, it’s your insurance policy. You know that your project topic and your general approach to the analysis are acceptable, so if you follow through you will do quality work and your grade will reflect that. Without an approved plan, you’re taking the risk of analyzing your data wrong — even worse, you might pick a topic of descriptive statistics instead of inferential statistics, which would make your entire project unacceptable.

Second, with an approved plan you can choose to present your project to the class for up to 15 points extra credit. That’s usually enough to raise your final course grade a notch, for example from a B+ to an A− or from a C− to a C. Please see Project Talk below.

To give you an incentive not to put the project off till the last minute, no approvals will be given after the mid-class break on the date shown in the schedule.

Again, remember to allow time for revisions to your plan. If you wait till the last day to start the process, there’s very little chance you’ll have enough time to complete those negotiations and revisions in a last-minute rush.

Data Collection

Sample Size

For your own original data, around 50 attribute responses or 35 numeric responses per sample are acceptable. (For Case 6 or 7, plan your sample size so that, according to your model, all the E’s are ≥5.) While a bigger sample size is almost always better, don’t make yourself nuts over this project. You’ll need time for designing your study and analyzing your data.

If those sample sizes aren’t practical, or if you’re using published data, please discuss sample size with Prof. Marvel in advance.

Survey Guidelines

If you’re taking a survey to gather data, please follow the guidelines in this section very carefully. These are TC3’s rules, not mine, so I can’t accept a project that doesn’t have the required approvals.

Survey form: At a minimum, you must include the following, prominently:

• Your name and class
• A statement that participation is voluntary
• A statement that all information is confidential

Make sure nothing on the form lets you identify the respondent personally.

Approvals: Before you distribute any survey, you must obtain all required approvals in writing; allow extra time for this.

• You need my approval for every survey, without exception.
• If the survey will be distributed to anyone outside TC3, the Office of Institutional Research must also approve in advance. I’ll give you further information with my approval.
• If any minors will be given the survey, you must have their parents’ consent in advance. In practice this is so difficult to do that I advise against any project involving a survey of anyone under 18.

Attach all approvals to your project when you hand it in.

Survey technique:

Have respondents fill out a form and put it in a closed container. This is essential both to protect respondents' privacy and to ensure accurate answers or at least make them more likely. Because people being interviewed tend to answer what they think the interviewer wants to hear, it’s not acceptable just to ask people a question and write down their answers.

If you want to distribute your survey during a class, be sure to arrange this with the instructor well in advance, but understand that instructors may not have time. In any class where you distribute a survey, you must announce that this is voluntary and not a class requirement.

TC3 Survey Guidelines must be followed. Please see <http://www.tc3.edu/dept/ir/guidelines.asp> for the full guidelines.

Data from Other Sources

You need not collect the data yourself. In your report, cite your source (see the TC3 library’s Citation Guide if you need help) and attach a printout, photocopy, or tear sheet as appropriate. (If you collate data from many sources, please talk to Prof. Marvel before copying or printing many sheets of paper.)

The Office of Institutional Research provides anonymized data from the TC3 student database for many types of requests. You can obtain data for most requests yourself by visiting http://www.tc3.edu/dept/ir/math200.asp. If you need other forms of student data, please consult with Kristine Altucher at least two weeks in advance to find out whether your request can be filled and to allow enough time for her office to prepare the data.

When you use the student database, remember you must do inferential statistics. That means you must take a sample and use it to test a claim about a larger population. Think carefully about what population you are testing with your sample.

Project Report

Your project report will document what you did, and it is the basis for your grade. Treat this like any other important presentation: proofread it to make sure you actually said what you mean to, check spelling and grammar, use technical terms correctly without “snowing” your audience, and so on. (If your English skills are shaky, you may want to consult with a writing tutor in the Baker Center.) Staple or bind everything together in order; don’t waste your money on a report cover.

How long should the report be? Long enough to cover the things listed in the Grading Rubric, below and no longer. Don’t try to pad it to make it look more impressive.

Attach your approved Field Project Plan, either the paper signed by Prof. Marvel or a printout of the email approval. For a survey outside TC3, also attach your approval from the Office of Institutional Research. I can’t accept a survey project without the proper approval(s).

Project Talk

For extra credit, on project day you may present your project to the class. The maximum time is five minutes, but you can take less time if you don’t need it all.

See the last section of the Grading Rubric for the points you need to cover in your presentation. You may use any notes or visual aids that you want, but visual aids aren’t required.

A signup sheet will be available at the previous class meeting. You must sign up then if you want to present your project to the class. Presentations will be in random order, not signup order.

Only students who have done their project according to an approved Field Project Plan may earn extra credit.

Grading Rubric

Please follow this order, to ensure that you get full credit for your work.

Field Project Plan

Instructions: Either print out this form and write in your answers, write your answers on separate paper, or email just the answers (in plain text) to Prof. Marvel.

1. My name (first&last) is...

2. I intend to test this claim...
   (A claim is a declarative sentence, not a question.)

    

3. I will use this case number...

4. My hypotheses in symbols are...
   (Use words for Cases 6 and 7.)

    

5. My data collection plan is...
   (Answer whichever one of these applies.)

   • ___ I’ll use published data, including the TC3 student database. My source is (URL, book title and author, newspaper name and issue date, etc.).
   • ___ I’m planning a survey. (a) I attach a copy of my survey form. (b) Here’s where and when I intend to conduct it. (Don’t start your survey before it’s approved.)
   • ___ Neither of the above; my plan is as follows.
     (Example: “I will buy two one-pound bags of plain M&Ms and count the colors.”)

    

6. I plan sample size(s) of...

    

7. The population size is...
   (Remember that the population must be quite a bit larger than your sample.)