Mayfield High school introduction

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Introduction to Maths Statistics Coursework

For my year 11 coursework project I have been asked to complete a statistics project. The aim of my coursework project is to demonstrate as many data handling skills as possible in the form of a report on a statistical hypothesis. I have decided to demonstrate my knowledge by using the line of enquiry of Height and Weight as this is continuous data and will therefore give me better accuracy, more data and will make it easier to compare the certain types of data which I will collect. The information is about the fictional school ‘Mayfield High School’. I have been given data on all children attending this school and their heights and weights in the form of an Edexcel spreadsheet.

As the school consists of 1183 children I have decided to take a stratified sample on each year group. I chose stratified sampling as my method of sampling as it uses the proportion of each group in the sample matching the proportion of each group in the entire population. I chose the sample size of 10% as this is easily divided and presented to other people. The method of stratified sampling is very accurate and through my working of 10% I have found my sample size to be 118 (10% of 1183=118) which I have rounded up to 120.

Through my chosen sample size of 10% which I carried out on each year group for both boys and girls I found that some of the numbers were not whole. In order to make these numbers whole I rounded down on all data I was presented with. As I was rounding down my sample of all student no longer was 120 but 114. I will do this by finding the number of boys or girls in a certain year group. I then divided that number by the total students at ‘Mayfield High School’. I then multiplied this by my sample size of 120.

An example of this in action

151 (Number of boys in year 7)                                       x            120 (Sample Size)  

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1183 (Total students at ‘Mayfield High School’)  

This all equals 15.3 which is not a whole number. So I have rounded it down, as I have done for all my data that is not a whole number. This gave me the answer of 15. Through this I know that I will take a sample of 15 student’s heights and weights from the boys in year 7. To find out the sampling sizes for the girls and for other year groups I will then use the same method and round the number I get down. The numbers I ...

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