Goals Fulfilled:
MATH 171, Statistical Decision Making, which I satisfactorily completed during the Fall 2021 semester, fulfilled one of my eight Honors course requirements as well as a major course requirement.
Reflection:
Statistical Decision Making covered graphical displays of data, measures of central tendency and variability, sampling distributions, and confidence intervals and hypothesis testing for means and proportions. The Honors section in which I was enrolled was designed as a fast-paced course emphasizing critical discussion and collaboration among classmates through a series of quantitative reasoning projects. Taught by Dr. Sharon Emerson-Stonnell, MATH 171 was also the first mathematics course I have taken at Longwood University.
While I loved studying algebra and geometry in high school, the idea of enrolling in a statistics course worried me, but I was eager to take on the challenge of learning a new side of maths. Luckily, I was paired with an incredible student (my best friend, Emily Robertson) for our two major projects, and together, we produced an incredible amount of statistical analysis in a very short period of time.
For our first quantitative reasoning project, Emily and I chose to examine the survey answers from Longwood University students registered for MATH 171 and MATH 301 courses in fall 2021 when posed the qualitative (categorical) question, “Do you approve of the job Joe Biden is doing as president?” We sought to investigate surveyed students’ responses to determine the proportion of all college students who approve of President Biden’s job performance via two confidence intervals. For our second quantitative reasoning project, we chose to examine the same survey answers with a different goal in mind, comparing students’ responses via a hypothesis test for two proportions, a two-proportion z test, with survey answers from Longwood University students registered for MATH 171 and MATH 301 courses in fall 2019 when posed the qualitative question, “Do you approve of the job Donald Trump is doing as president?”
Our two projects are linked below via Google Docs.