Mathematics Statistics Coursework

I am going to design and then carry out an experiment to test peoples reaction times, and therefore test my initial hypothesis. Initial Hypothesis: Some people have faster reaction times than others To design my investigation, I requested data from games that the whole of Greenford high school played on computers; this guarantees the accuracy of the data. However, it was noticed that some people did not play the games at all, completely missing it. It was decided that if this happened, they would be filtered out. This is because we could not just record the time taken as as this in unplottable. We could not put 0 down as the recorded time as this is the fastest time in which you can complete the game, and this implies the participant has a very fast reaction time as opposed to a very slow one. The results from the tests backed up my original hypothesis, as many different reaction times were collected from all the different girls. I can now move on to make a more precise hypothesis Younger students have quicker reaction times than older ones. This is an appropriate hypothesis to make based on the sample I took for the entire population 216 Students at GHS Sampling my collected data I will sample my data further as there are too many people included. This means interpreting the data will take too much time and will be hard to plot graphs from the resulting graphs would be too cluttered. I will make my sample a size of 60 pupils, as I feel this will provide me with enough data to get accurate conclusions, and prove my hypothesis, but not give me so much data that all my graphs are cluttered. I have chosen to do a stratified sample. This is because I wish to have a range of pupils, and if I just did a random sample, I could end up with mostly older students, or mostly younger. After finding out how many students must be chosen from each year, I will find out how many

students data will be needed from each year, and then I will use the random number generator for each separate year to determine which pieces of data I will use. Year Year Year Year group group group group 1 (years 7): 29/217 x 30= 4.009 4 2 (year 8): 67/217 x 30= 9.263 9 3 (year 9): 64/217 x 30= 8.848 9 4 (year 10): 57/217 x 30= 7.880 8

As I cannot take part of a set of data, I will have to round these numbers to the nearest whole numbers, as shown above. Interpreting the data There are many different aspects of the data I could use to make graphs, and interpret the data to prove or disprove my hypothesis. However I have chosen to use the each set of data. I chose to do the median because it will not give the very slow or very fast times, but the most average time for the pupil, and hopefully cut out the main outliers. The best time will give me an idea of how good each of the girls are when they concentrate and try their hardest. First of all I will create a table of all the medians from which I can make my graphs.

Class Games Median

8y1 8y1 8x1 8x1 8x1 8x1 8x1 9y1 1696.0 78 1240.3 54 955.76 87 991.60 4 4616.9 05 1456.6 77 1040.6 44 1713.6

9y1 9y1 9y1 9y1 9y1 9y1 9y1 9y1 7y1

62 3771.8 31 1735.2 25 820.11 93 1082.7 93 1208.6 2133.6 41 804.05 73 2969.8 23 4000.5 08

7y1 7y1 7y1 10x1 10x1 10x1 10x1 10x1 10x1

3391.4 95 4624.7 93 3959.1 18 255058 .5 1079.6 28 6355.4 36 1215.3 34 862.71 77 1019.0 61

10x1

253995 .8

10x1

1087.3 17

Using Autograph, I created box and whisker diagrams, making it easier to compare my data. These are an easy way to compare data as you can easily see where the bulk of the reaction times are, and how fast they are, as they will be in the box. The whiskers will show me how many anomalies there are, as the average times will all be in the box, and the few which stretch outside the inter quartile range are not common times. The further away from the boxes that the whiskers stretch, the further away from the average the anomalies are. I collected together the results, I then plotted these results.

I have noticed a few things about this box and whisker diagram. Firstly, I notice that this diagram does prove my hypothesis that the particpants would have faster reaction times in the morning than in the afternoon. I notice that the interquartile range of both boxplots are similar. The interquartile range of the am boxplot (the blue diagram at the top) is further towards the left than that of the pm boxplot (the yellow diagram at the bottom). This shows that on average, the girls had faster reaction times in the morning than in the afternoon. However, the whisker on the pm boxplot stretches further to the left. This tells me that to

get a better idea of whether or not my hypothesis is accurate, I need to check for and eliminate any outliers. To work out which values are outliers, I must find the interquartile range and multiply it by 1.5 (call this value f ). Outliers lie between f to the left of the lower quartile and f to the right of the upper quartile.

f is equal to 4.5x1.5 which is 6.75 The lower quartile is 15.5 and the upper quartile is 20 Therefore any reaction time below 8.75 and above 26.75 is an outlier.
I will now eliminate the outliers. There were in fact no outliers in the am boxplot but several in the pm boxplot. This is my new boxplot. I can conclude that my hypothesis has been proven, and that younger students at Greenford High School DO have faster reaction times than Older Students These results show that younger students have quicker reaction times than older students. However, to really prove this, I would need to take reaction times from many more students aged 11-16 across the country. If I had had more time, I would have looked into whether or not the same hypothesis could be proved in children aged 6-11. I would also have seen if age made a difference, for example would people aged 71-76 have slower reaction times than those aged 11-16. I could have looked at all sorts of aspects (age, gender, environment etc) and seen how these altered reaction times. I might also have taken certain measures to ensure my data was more accurate. For example I could have taken a larger sample size- in a larger sample, trends would have been easier to identify made the participants repeat the games more than once