Anonymous Student
Dr. Sinn
MATH 2400, Project 5
December 6, 2004
Is Residence Life Beneficial Academically?
When we were given this assignment, I thought a while about what I would like to study. I went home one weekend and tried to get some work done while I was there and found it extremely difficult, as I do every time. I thought maybe this was the case with other girls that live on campus. With that thought in mind, I decided to study resident females to find if their GPA was greater than the average at North Georgia College & State University.
I thought residents’ GPA would be higher due to the environment and the fact that there is basically nothing else you can do in your tiny rooms. Also the availability of extra help from others classmates who live in the dorms could attribute {contribute?} to a higher GPA. Always being on campus could prove beneficial in other ways also, such as being able to take advantage of the labs at more convenient times or having professors available at their office hours. I did not expect to find a huge difference in GPA, but I thought there would be a slight advantage to those living on-campus. With this study and the given mean and standard deviation for the population from Dr. Sinn’s web page, I found a Z-Test appropriate.
Research
I began the study with a survey that asked resident females a series of questions. They were to give basic information such as how many years they have lived on-campus, class status, and their GPA. There were also questions that asked where they spent most of their time working outside of class completing assignments, how they studied (groups or alone), and where they found studying most difficult. I decided to survey resident females in Lewis Hall only. These are all upper-classmen and I figured they would have experience living in the dorms and an established GPA. {Nice study design, here. I like the idea that you asked them how long they have lived in the dorm. Very insightful.} I went from room-to-room, asking if they would mind participating in a survey for my project. They were given separate sheets of paper with the questions. I had no problems with girls not wanting to participate, so my data collecting went rather smoothly. I collected 35 data samples because that is the amount of girls I have living on my hall. I did not collect data from one hall only to get more diverse information. Sometimes girls of the same sorority live together on one hall, and I wanted to get a broader range of people. Due to all this, my sample method ended being convenience sampling {and cluster, since you got EVERYONE on the hallway to participate}.
My research sample is not representative of the overall population at NGCSU. This is due not only to the fact that I surveyed resident females, but also because I did not include freshmen in my study. The majority of girls I surveyed turned out to be sophomores in their second year of living in the resident halls. With my hypothesis, it was not possible to achieve a representative sample. I wanted just to compare a small subgroup to the overall to see if a difference really exists. {Actually, resident sophomores is probably a good group to study. Don’t many upperclassmen move off campus? With sophomores, you are more likely to get people whose majority of time in college has been spent living in dorms.} I have added graphs with some of the data from the survey at the end of the report, and also attached in the Excel file.
Results
After I had finished collecting my data, I set up my null hypothesis and my research hypothesis. My null hypothesis stated that there would be no difference in the GPA of resident females and that of NGCSU overall. The research hypothesis claimed that resident females’ GPA would be greater or higher than the average at NGCSU. I set them up as follows:
H0 : Resident women GPA = NGCSU GPA
H1 : Resident women GPA > NGCSU GPA
With my data, I found the average GPA of resident females to be 3.11 with a standard deviation of .506. This being an exploratory study, with a low sample number, I set a high at .10. I ran a Z-test to see if the GPA was greater than NGCSU, so it was a right-tailed test. After running the test, and to my surprise, I found the p-value to be .7323. This is a really high p-value that is nowhere close to a. As a result, the study fails to reject the null hypothesis. There is no reason to believe there is a difference between the GPA of resident females and everybody else at NGCSU. So, I concluded maybe I just have a weird fixation on studying in the dorms. {Fixation on studying—anywhere, anytime, anyplace—can be called weird, if by that you mean abnormal. That’s why your grades are good relative to the rest of NGCSU!!}
Also included in my study was where resident females spent most of their time studying or working on out-of-class assignments. Out of the choices given (dorm room, dorm lobbies, library, labs, or other), 88.6% said they preferred studying in their dorm rooms, with 94.3% saying they studied alone. This did not support my idea of having the extra help available to those who live on-campus. Since most studied alone, they did not take advantage of receiving help from others in their classes who live in the dorms also. The survey also asked if studying at home or in the dorms was more difficult. The results showed 62.9% of girls found it more difficult to study at home, and 14.3% said neither was more difficult. This somewhat actually supported my original thoughts, which turn out to be the only thing that supported my original thoughts! I found that I am not alone in finding it hard to complete assignments or study when I go home.
This study did not support the idea that students benefits from resident life academically. Students can adjust to their surrounding and situations to accomplish the tasks they have to complete. If I had never lived in the dorms, I would not have found it difficult to study at home. This project was a lot of fun, and I enjoyed finding the information on the subject. Even though I did not achieve the results I had wanted, I found the information interesting. It is always neat to find out how I compare to other people in the same situations.
After completing the project, I can think of so many different things I would like to study. I hope to use what I learned from the class in the future, when I have some free time from all my classes, to research some fun topics. I feel I have learned a lot in this class compared to other math courses because it was new to me and different from any others I had taken. This project, along with the earlier ones, provided a good hands-on way to learn statistics.
|
Study
Habits |
|
|
Alone |
33 |
|
In Groups |
2 |
|
Study
Location |
|
|
Dorm Room |
29 |
|
Lobby |
0 |
|
Library |
1 |
|
Lab |
1 |
|
Other |
2 |
|
Most
Difficult Area |
|
|
Dorms |
8 |
|
Home |
22 |
|
Neither |
5 |
{This is a beautifully done study. And thank you for the kind comments at the end. I do try to make statistics interesting and educational. I wish it could be fun, and try to make it so. But sometimes learning is work, and sometimes work is not fun. Back to your study. Excellent design. I think you discussed your study design in more depth than almost anyone else. The only complaint I have is that you actually seemed to have done some cluster sampling and did not mention it. Also, you could have discussed Type I and II error rates. But you did say how you were setting alpha. I also liked the “soft” research at the end about how many girls had trouble studying at home and where they like to study. Surprising that only 1 of them studies most often in the library. I used to go every night—well, when I was doing well in college, I was! All in all, this was great project. It’s one of those that I love to grade: interesting to read, glance over the stats part briefly and see that’s all good, then just sit back and enjoy the story the student is telling knowing that I will be able to report back with good news and a grade of an A. Congratulations on a fine job in stats this semester.}