An Investigation into the Relationship Between Weight and IQ at Mayfield High School.

GCSE Maths

An Investigation into the Relationship Between Weight and IQ at Mayfield High School

Hypothesis

I will investigate the following statements:

Heavier people have a lower IQ than lighter people.
Boys are heavier than girls.
Therefore, Girls are more intelligent than Boys.

I will need to collect the following information:

Year Group:

So I can make sure I collect a fair sample using every year in the school.

Gender:

So I can investigate the statement boys are heavier than girls and girls are more intelligent than boys.

So I can investigate the statements girls are more intelligent than boys and heavier people have lower IQs.

Weight:

So I can investigate the statements boys are heavier than girls and heavier people have lower IQs.

I know that this data is reliable because it came from the recognized EDEXCEL GCSE exam bored website, but there may still be some manual errors in the data from when it was being typed up.

I am going to use a sample size of eighty students because I think that is a fair sample size for years 7 to 11 because it is not too small neither too large and I should be able to get a substantial number of students from each year into the data sample.

The Sample (80 Students)

To make sure I get a fair sample from each year I am going to do a stratified random sample. This is done by dividing the number of students in a year, by the number of pupils in the school and multiplying that by your sample size.

I.e. number of students in year group

Number of students in school

But in my investigation I want to be even more specific and make sure a have a stratified random sample of both boys and girls in the year. This will be done almost exactly the same as the example random stratified sample calculation I have given although instead of ‘number of students in year group’ it will be ‘number of boys/girls in year group’.

There are 1183 students at Mayfield High School. My investigation covers KS3 and KS4 year groups. In year 7 there are 151 boys and 131 girls. Year 8 has 145 boys and 125 girls, year 9 has 118 boys and 143 girls, year 10 has 106 boys and 94 girls and year 11 has 84 boys and 86 girls.

From that given information I can already tell that there are going to be more year 7s in the sample than year 11s simple because there are more students lower down in the school.