The last month or so of every semester, many students’ Outlooks are flooded with emails about surveys to fill out, or they may receive paper surveys throughout the day. While many students disregard them or fill them out without a second thought, they are contributing to a valuable educational project for hundreds of AP Statistics students every year.
AP Statistics is a college-level course that teaches students how to collect, analyze, and interpret data and information. At Leesville Road High School, it’s a common math elective for many students to take. The course concludes with a final assignment, an elaborate project that enables students to apply all they’ve learned throughout the year.
In this project, students are tasked with coming up with their own research question, collecting samples, and then implementing descriptive statistics and significance tests that were learned throughout the course.
“The obvious goal of the project is to have some real-world application of stuff we’ve worked on. It’s important to have students understand how quickly investigating statistics can get complicated… and it reinforces the need to be clear, concise, and purposeful when dealing with statistics,” said Mr. Tetreault, one of the AP Statistics teachers.
Not only do students get real-world experience with the very processes they’ve been taught, but they also get to explore any topic that they’re curious about.
“For our project, we’re researching the correlation between the number of siblings a person has and the children they want. We decided to research this because we noticed that we and our friends all want the same number of children as the number in their household. I have one sibling myself, and I want two kids,” said Jillian Hamel, a sophomore.
The answers to these surveys aren’t just for fun, no matter how unserious they may seem, as they’re helping fellow students apply their knowledge to real-life situations.
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