Final Project Guidelines
Education 160
The main goal of the final project is to help you have fun with the statistical tools that you have learned in this course, and to do so in a realistic data collection and data analysis setting. You may draw from any existing data set of your choice, but a strong recommendation is that you start with data sets available at the California State Department of Education website. While you are free to explore and choose whatever data set you find interesting within these data sources, I would recommend that you try and establish a relationship between SAT-9 data set and school characteristics available through the DataQuest link. Try not to bite off more than you can chew, i.e., don't do all grade levels, all students, all schools, etc.: e.g., is there a relationship between changes in SAT-9 reading scores (at some selected grade levels) for English learners from 2000 to 2001 and the rate at which English learners were redesignated as FEP in those schools? Having decided on a question, you will need to think of a sampling plan (you might find a random numbers table useful -- available on the back of many stats books, though not ours).
The report should have the following sections:
If possible, consult the APA Publication Manual for style.
You may work in groups of any size. The major objective is that you find meaning and personal fulfillment in statistical analysis. At the end of the write-up, please have each person contribute an "About the Author" paragraph that briefly describes yourself, what your primary contribution to the project was, and what you learned from doing the project (no more than 300 words).
If you would like to put your project in the form of a website, that would be really great, because I will be able to conveniently use it (with your permission) as examples for future classes.
This project is due Monday, December 9 at 5:00 PM.
This page was last updated 11/12/02