Elementary Statistics
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Project 2A

Hypothesis Testing

Objectives:

  • Identify a hypothesis testing problem in print.
  • Conduct a survey.
  • Verify or dispute the survey results.
  • Summarize the article, analysis, and conclusions in a report.

Instructions: As you complete teach task below, check it off. Answer all questions in your summary.

_____ 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.
_____ Make 2 copies of the appropriate solution sheet.
_____ 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 chart 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:

  1. Brief discussion of the article, including the source.
  2. Statement of the claim made in the article (one of the hypotheses).
  3. 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 stated above, convenience sampling is not acceptable.
  4. 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.
  5. Sentence interpreting your confidence interval in the context of the situation in your project.

Turn in the following typed (12 point) and stapled packet for your final project:

  1. Cover sheet containing your name(s) and the name of your study.
  2. Summary, which includes all items listed on summary checklist.
  3. Solution sheet neatly and completely filled out.
  4. Graphic representation of your data, created following the guidelines discussed above. Include only graphs which are appropriate and useful.
  5. Raw data collected AND a table summarizing the sample data (n, xbar and s; or x, n, and p’, as appropriate for your hypotheses). The raw data does not need to be typed, but the summary does.


Content Developed by Susan Dean and Barbara Illowsky, Licensed under a Creative Commons License
Published by the Sofia Open Content Initiative
© 2004 Foothill-De Anza Community College District & The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation