I'm not sure how I'm on week 11 when it's week 12, but I am. This week we got 5 people to take the survey. 3 people got better grades, 1 got worse, and 1 stayed the same. The two people that described themselves as hardworking saw their grades go down which was odd. When I was creating the graph to see how everyone did, I noticed that most people's work ethic coincided with how their GPA was effected.
We hit 60 people which was the revised goal we set a few weeks ago. I'm glad we got here because 60 is a number that you can have a good, diverse data sample with. We have a lot of data and overall I feel like the project was a success. We ended up seeing that people who participated in 1, 4, 5, or 6 ECA's saw their GPA go up while 2, 3, or 8 saw their GPA suffer. We didn't have any data for 7 ECA's.
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This week 7 more people were surveyed to help our efforts towards 60+ people. I think the goal is definitely achievable and that we can maybe even make it to 65 or 70 people. I would say that 80 getting 80 people surveyed isn't very realistic at this point.
Out of the 7 people that were surveyed this week 4 saw their GPA go up, 2 saw their grade point average go down and 1 saw their GPA remain the same. Everyone we surveyed this week we knew, sometimes we haven't known the people we were surveying so it makes it hard to tell if the people were telling the truth or to actually know what their work ethic's like. This week though I found it interesting that when people described their work ethic, it actually went pretty well with how their GPA was effected. This week we collected 11 names. 5 people saw their GPA's go up. 5 people saw their GPA's take a dip in between a semester. 2 People saw their GPA's stay the exact same between semesters. This was interesting to me because instead of seeing some firm statistics showing one way or another, we saw varying results that don't help us in finding a definitive answer.
At that pace we should be able to get to 65-75 people. That would be a good solid survey that can provide us with lots of varying data. Luke and I would be very happy if we could make it to that, of course we are trying to get to the 100 people we originally set our goal at but the odds of that happening at this point are slim to none. This week Luke and I added a few more names, not enough to meet the goal we had set though. We are now hoping to survey somewhere between 60-80 people. I decided to do a range because every time we've set a number so far we haven't met it, I'm hoping that with a fairly big range we will be encouraged to make it to that number. 60 people is a modest number that can still show an accurate representation with a good amount of data.
This week has been the opposite from last week and the weeks prior. I noticed this week that people with lower GPA's weren't as willing to share. Once I finally convinced them to let me use them in the survey they seemed to be fine with it suddenly. This week we surveyed a few more people but not the 12 that we needed to stay on track to reach our goal. I believe we got 9 people this week to take the survey. We are finding it a bit more challenging to survey people than we originally thought. I thought that we would get done early but it's turning out that we might just barely get by.
I think people are less likely to take the survey because they don't want their GPA on the survey. I think most people are smarter than they realize though and that GPA's would actually be close to other participants in the survey. We've mostly found that the people with lower GPA's don't really care if their's gets out. If we're being honest, this project has been a lot more challenging than I thought it would be. We have faced many more road blocks than we expected along the way. Originally Luke was going to be finishing up high school basketball which would leave him with a lot of free time to survey people. We didn't take into account that he would be starting travel basketball though and that's led to us getting less work done than we originally thought. I also got hurt early in the baseball season which has caused me to go to practice from right after school to 6, to physical therapy from 6:30 to 7:30 and then work on homework for the next 3 hours or so.
To get this project to the point that we can be proud of it, in my opinion we need to reach to 100 person goal like we originally set out to achieve. For that to happen we need to survey about 12 people per week from here on out. That is going to be very hard to reach but I know that if we really try we can make it. I feel like in the last few weeks we haven't been putting as much effort in as we should and that's what needs to change to make the 100 person objective. This week Luke and I collected data from people who weren't sophomores. We got a few juniors and seniors data put into the spreadsheet. We still have a problem with getting freshmen data however. Our problem is that we can't get data from this years freshman class because the ones that did participate in things first semester because they didn't have a GPA to begin the year and therefore can't give us data. We can't get data from this semester because they won't get a new GPA by the time the project is over.
We are thinking that in order to get data from "freshman" we will have to survey sophomores and ask them about last year. This could be troublesome however if they want to participate in the experiment and give us an inaccurate GPA just to become apart of the statistics. We're thinking that we will survey people that have already given us data from their sophomore year in order to avoid that from happening. This week we started to gather new information again. We didn't do anything last week so it was nice to be able to input some new information this week. We only collected 7 new names but that's because we had a few problems that we had to go back in and fix. A few times while inputting information Luke or myself ending up putting new data on top of old data. This was happening because we are putting all of our data on a Google Sheets and it was loading slow causing me to not be able to see when Luke had put information somewhere and I was going and putting new information on top of the old information.
We also added a new category this week. We realized that we needed a way to tell what a person's work ethic was like to get a better idea of how their GPA was effected not just by how many extra curricular activities they participated in. We realized we needed to show what their work ethic was like to be able to tell how much effort they put into homework, if any. That led us to starting a category that allows them to describe their work ethic in their own words. Keep in mind there's nothing stopping a person from lying about their work ethic, this is just relying on them to be 100% honest about it. The data that we have collected thus far shows us, that while participating in extracurricular activities your GPA does drop. So far while collecting data every single persons GPA has dropped during the semester that they were active.
I'm hoping that we can prove in our future studies that the GPAs go up and our prior test subjects were just anomalies. I think the odds that they will improve over time is a bit of a reach however because we have surveyed 17 people and I don't think they can be considered anomalies anymore. This week for the genius hour, we started to collect data. We mostly collected data in class during our one hour on Wednesday that's dedicated to the genius project. In total we collected 14 names this week and we want to expand on that.
We feel like the data we collected this week was very good and we think it will be a strong foundation to our project as a whole. I do think that we could make our stats a little more specific, and instead of just saying the number of extra curricular activities a person participates in, we should list what exactly they did/do. |
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