I took MATH 171 Statistical Decision Making for the Quantitative Reasoning Pillar in my Fall semester Freshman Year. MATH 171 is also a required class for my major of Psychology, so it also completed that requirement. All throughout school I have always enjoyed math classes because it is a concept that has always come so easy to me. Before this class, I had a little knowledge of statistics because of my first psychology class in high school. I have always found it interesting to see the statistics of many different possibilities, especially regarding correlations. Statistics is an important part of Psychology, as is helps to understand all the research data discovered and reviewed in this field, so it was good that I was able to easily understand how to read statistics and create them myself.
For the first and only project we had to complete in this class, we had to work with a group of people to complete it. I am, personally, generally against working in groups because of the difficulties caused with splitting up group work, especially when it comes to papers where each person has a different writing style in an assignment which calls for cohesion. It was difficult for me to do this project because of this. Each of the group members wrote a different section of the paper, which made for multiple different writing styles in one document. Despite my hesitancies, all of my group members worked well together and the final result for the paper was positive. Work like this has helped me come to the conclusion that it is ok for multiple people to work on the same document, as long as the is work coming from each person and a lot of collaboration in between to ensure everyone is satisfied with the results. Although, given the choice, I still prefer to write papers alone.
Final Statistics Project; Ariel Birkholz; 12 December 2019. A collaboration project reviewing different charities for statistical differences and significances.