I am going to design and then carry out an experiment to test people's reaction times, and therefore test my initial hypothesis.

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Mathematics Statistics Coursework

I am going to design and then carry out an experiment to test people’s reaction times, and therefore test my initial hypothesis.

Initial Hypothesis: Some people have faster reaction times than others

To design my investigation, I first need to carry out a preliminary test, to see what variables there are, and how I will control them. To test reaction times, I dropped a special piece of card, with numbers along it recording how many hundredths of a second it takes for the person to drop it. From the information gained by this test, I set my main rules.

However, it was noticed that some people did not catch the ruler at all, completely missing it. It was decided that if this happened, a reading of 30 would be taken as the recorded time. This is because we could not just record the time taken as ‘ - ’ as this in unplottable. We could not put ‘0’ down as the recorded time as this is the fastest time in which you can catch the ruler, and this implies the participant has a very fast reaction time as opposed to a very slow one.

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Now that I have set the rules, I can make a more precise hypothesis, relevant to who I will test this on. I have decided to test the reaction times of girls at Withington, between and including years 7 and 11. This will therefore be 325 girls aged 11-16. I chose this as I think this is an appropriate sample for my original hypothesis. It is easy to collect data for, and a good way to test this very general hypothesis.

The data was collected by forms and then in year groups. This is then one large set ...

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