STAtistics Monthly Schedule

(AP Statistics, Period E)

M 12/1/03	HW due: Draft research question, methodology, and consent form (if using human subjects) for the experimental design and execution project.
T 12/2/03	HW due: Revised draft of research question, methodology, and consent form. In making your revisions, make sure that your project is ethical and thoroughly described, but also sufficiently limited in scope so that you can finish it in less than two weeks. Pay special attention to the environment of the testing situation, and describe it in considerable detail. If blinding is involved (single- or double-blinding), you must describe how you will accomplish the blinding through coding or labor-sharing. Consider the issue of how you will handle questions from subjects: Will you give printed information and refuse to answer verbal questions? Will you answer verbal questions from a script? Will you answer any question that subjects throw at you? If a subject asks an out-of-bounds question that could compromise the validity of the data, will you disqualify the subject immediately, or will you allow the subject to take the test and then mark the data row later as being invalid? These are the sorts of issues you should think about in advance. Although it is impossible to plan for every scenario, the quality of your planning will directly affect the quality of your data and the smoothness of your testing. Finally, make sure that your consent form has a professional tone (no tongue-in-cheek remarks). Your consent form, in order to be ethical, must inform the subjects of the general purpose of the research. Omitting some details, obviously, will be necessary in order to avoid a Hawthorne effect. For example, the group that is looking at proctoring as a variable in test performance should say something like this: Our research goal is to see how students like you perform on a variety of test problems under different conditions. Your score will be recorded anonymously, and no one other than the members of our group will know your score. The purpose of this research is to satisfy requirements for an AP Statistics course at St. Albans School. If the results of this research are used in a published article, no personally identifiable information that could compromise your anonymity will be included. If you wish to learn your score on the test, please speak to the group leader, ______ ______ , after Jan. 26, 2004. Of course, you will also need a paragraph in which the subject explicitly gives his/her consent and, if necessary, indicates date of birth. Omit any mention of lawsuit, unless you have a parent who is an attorney, because I suspect the first thing a good lawyer would do is to laugh at such a clause. This is America, where anyone can sue anyone for any reason, and if people wish to sue you for the emotional distress caused by your experiment, no stack of consent forms will protect you. If you wish to give written instructions to your subjects and have them initial to indicate comprehension, you may also do that on the consent form. The consent form would also be an ideal place to use survey-style questions to gather any demographic information you might need later for blocking (e.g., gender or age).
W 12/3/03	HW due: Revise your Chapter 5/6 test to 100%, writing metaknowledge statements (statements concerning what you know about what you know) for each problem that you missed. Show your work, please, along with your metaknowledge statements. A separate sheet of paper is preferred but not required.
Th 12/4/03	HW due: Read §7.1. (As always, reading notes are required.)
F 12/5/03	Day of rest.
M 12/8/03	HW due: Read §7.2. (This assignment was given in class on Thursday. Because I was late posting the problems from §7.1, those problems will not be due until tomorrow.)
T 12/9/03	HW due: Write #7.7, 7.11abc, 7.13, 7.15, 7.22, 7.23, plus the exercise described below. Warning for #7.7: Because this problem deals with a discrete r.v., you cannot ignore the distinction between open and closed intervals (i.e., between strict and inclusive inequalities) the way you would with a continuous distribution. Additional exercise: Let X and Y denote the outcomes when two independent dice are rolled. In class, we calculated Var(X) by hand, using a table with carefully labeled columns. We also saw that if we store the xi values in L1 and the probabilities (1/6, 1/6, 1/6, 1/6, 1/6, 1/6) in L2, the TI-83 calculator command STAT CALC 1-Var Stats L1,L2 ENTER will quickly spit out the mean and s.d. as a check on our work. For tomorrow, do the exercise of computing Var(X + Y) by hand, showing the entire table. If you paid attention in class today, you will know what the answer should be even before you use your calculator to check. In other words, calculate the s.d. of the sum of two fair dice. This r.v., which you may call S, is clearly discrete with mean 7.0. We know that S can attain values from 2 through 12, and we studied the probabilities last week (check your notes).
W 12/10/03	HW due: Read §8.1.
Th 12/11/03	HW due: #7.22-7.27 all (note: two of these were already assigned), plus 7.31, 7.32, 7.42.
F 12/12/03	No additional HW due. However, one of the groups still owes me a revised methodology statement and consent form. Please get that to me ASAP to avoid losing points!
M 12/15/03	No additional HW, but work on your group projects. I will be providing a critique, by e-mail, to each group leader. Projects will be due Friday, 1/9/04.
T 12/16/03	HW due: Start reading §8.2. No reading notes will be due just yet.
W 12/17/03	HW due: Finish reading §8.2 (incl. reading notes) and work on your group project.
Th 12/18/03	HW due: #8.22, 8.24, 8.25, 8.29. People who were present in class on W 12/17 and who took written class notes are exempt from doing #8.22.
F 12/19/03	Quiz on Chapter 8 (20 points).

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Last updated: 05 Jan 2004