MATH 300 - Statistics Milestone 1. Questions and Answers

MATH 300 - Statistics Milestone 1. Introduction to Milestone 1 Questions and Answers Introduction to Statistics Milestone 1 1 Jay wants to study nutrition and performance in schools using available data. Which of the scenarios below will provide Jay with available data? Going to a local high school and asking the principal for information about students' current and previous grades, then interviewing a random selection of students about their eating habits. Going to a local high school and asking the principal for information about students' previous grades, then interviewing a random selection of students about their eating habits. Going to a local high school and asking the principal for information about students' current and previous grades, then asking the health teacher for the results from a survey students took in health class. Going to a local college and asking current undergraduates to report their grades and eating habits from high school. RATIONALE Recall, for data to be considered available data it must already be collected. Since the grades data and survey data were already collected these are examples of available data. 2 An art teacher is trying to determine which class to offer next summer. She passes out a slip of paper to some of the students in the class asking them whether or not they liked her course, and what class they would most like to see offered in the summer. Which type of statistical study is the art teacher conducting? A survey A single-blind study A double-blind study A census RATIONALE Since she asks people what their preferences would be, this is an example of a survey. 3 A factory manufactures motorcycles. One of its employees, working in the quality control department, checks the first 10 and the last 10 motorcycles manufactured in a day. This is what type of sampling? Voluntary response sampling Convenience sampling Stratified sampling Systematic sampling RATIONALE Recall that convenience samples are samples taken due to their ease of gathering information. Since they simple used the first and last 10, this is an example of that. Convenience samples are generally biased as they probably don't represent the entire set of interest. 4 A trainer is studying the effects of vitamin D on his athletes. He has realized that there are many potential confounding factors, such as gender and age. To limit the effect of these confounding variables, he decided to first group two athletes together based on these variables (for example, two 21-year-old males). Then he randomly assigned one person to receive the vitamin D and the other to receive a sugar pill. What type of experimental design does this situation demonstrate? Matched-Pair Design Completely Randomized Design Simple Random Design Randomized Block Design RATIONALE By matching on age and gender this is called a matched-pair design. 5 Jenae noticed that many of her co-workers would opt for the coffee that appeared to be most recently brewed, regardless of the flavor of the coffee offered. This leads her to believe that what she was witnessing was not really representative of everyone's true flavor preferences. She adapted her experimental study accordingly. Select one control in Jenae's experimental study. Jenae uses different locations in the kitchen for the coffee pots. Jenae places condiments at random places throughout the kitchen. Jenae makes sure that the coffee in different pots is brewed at the same time. Jenae monitors the habits of the co-workers who do not drink coffee.