Another good question about writing the paper....

When you guys write the essay, you should really just be summarizing the worksheet we started in class into an essay format. Use appropriate vocab, be conscise/to the point. No babbling! No bs! No fluff!

I'll be collecting that worksheet but mostly just to check out your math. All of the other information I'll find in your essay. I'm thinking somewhere from 1-2 pages typed.

Anyway, here's my answer to an email...

Alright, good questions...

First off, for your conditions...what do you think? If you asked all seniors, did you take a random sample? Since we didn't, we'll say "Although we took a convenience sample we'll proceed with caution." For the success/failure, you have to do (np) and (nq) and both have to be bigger than 10--this should pass for everything except maybe the third question (pursue college); if it's not bigger than 10, same deal--we'll proceed with caution.

As for your paper, the first half should be talking about the sampling process. Really, you're just taking those first 3 questions on your worksheet and summing that up in essay format. Talk about what kind of sample you took, what your sample is as a whole (think about how the rest of your group chose people), and what kinds of bias there are. You probably won't name a specific type of bias, but talk about who's over/underrepresented and just think of different problems that would arise from the questions we have and the way we asked them.

Last, for the math part of your essay, you should write about the conditions--which were met, and which were not. Then, you want to interpret your confidence intervals, in context. Remember, in class we wrote some writing templates..."I am 90% confident that the true population proportion of students who work 16 or more hours per week lies between ____ and ____." You can also look in your textbook in chapter 19 and find the example they walk you through. For this piece, try not to just write the same boring sentence three times in a row. Also talk about if you think your estimates are correct and why/why not, or if the numbers seem logical/make sense.