Project 1

Within the first week of class, the group leader will assign one group member to complete the Minitab file, other group members to complete report parts, and will keep the Wrapping It Up part for himself or herself. The group leader is responsible for ensuring group members post their respective assigned parts of the project at least two days prior to the project due date - or even earlier if the leader specifies an earlier time when assigning parts, at the leader's discretion. If a group member is late, the leader will reassign that part to active group members and will let the instructor know immediately.

Meetings: Each group should meet before each report is due. Not all group members need to be involved in the meeting when schedules make that impractical. All students are, however, required to contribute to each report to receive credit.

1st Draft: At least 48 hours before the report's due date on the syllabus, each group member should submit their part of the report in D2L group discussions. The group leader will then quickly post to the group project's assignments folder a draft of the entire report.

All group members will be responsible for grading the assignments-folder-posted first draft of the report with the rubric (attached to the Project 1 folder in D2L's Assignments area) and editing the project whenever the rubric is not met clearly, accurately, and completely. The group should go through the entire report, discussing each part and matching each part to the rubric. Each group member is responsible for the entire report's accuracy, clarity, and completeness of the answers to all questions and the overall report presentation, style, and quality. If any group member feels a part of the report does not meet rubric specifications, is incorrect, or is lacking in any way, that part of the report should be discussed and revised by the group at the group meeting.

Evaluate your peers by submitting one peer review for each member of your group.

Individual grades will start with the group grade and get multiplied by a factor. Factors for students contributing nothing would be 0. Factors for students contributing only data or meeting attendance might be 0.05 or 0.1, for example. Factors for students doing everything well and submitting everything on time, including 1) individual contributions, 2) peer reviews and 3) the email to me listing agreed-upon group members, can be 1.05 or perhaps even higher in extreme cases, again as long as everything has been on time and done well. Students who have not submitted these three on time will have factors similar to 0.9, 0.8, 0.7, 0.5, or even smaller depending greatly on how these late submissions affected the group. This factor gets multiplied by the group grade (and often rounded to the nearest half-point).

Other members will be responsible for completing all assigned parts at least two days prior, or even earlier, if specified, and posting those parts to the group discussion board. If the group leader has not assigned roles for the project within two to three days of the previous project or pre-project being due, then the group contact the instructor know immediately. Any student who does not understand completely his or her assigned part should immediately ask for clarity and help from group members. Any member turning in his or her part late may receive a zero for the current project if this part was assigned and completed by another member because of the lateness.

In formal, professional reporting style, the full report for Project 1 needs to be written to include answers to everything in all questions, although the questions and question numbers should not be included. This report should read as if the reader has no knowledge of these questions nor any knowledge that the questions have prompted the writing of the report. The entire report should be in complete sentences and full paragraphs with the exception of tables, charts, graphs, equations, and lists of statistics. Everything from formatting to grammar to style should be as professional as possible.

Instructions for Minitab Only

Note: Minitab should be completed by one member of the group - or possibly by the group as a whole during a face-to-face meeting. Splitting parts of Minitab is far from ideal since Minitab parts cannot be copied and pasted from file to file. You can access the Minitab app from the Minitab module in D2L's Content area or by going to https://app.minitab.com/.

Watch the companion video: https://youtu.be/HwnTmKCkUMQ?si=J3gFVS6IY_r0ZVf9

1 - After opening and logging into Minitab, https://app.minitab.com/,

Click on the + for "Blank Project."
Click Navigator in the far left panel.
Then click the dropdown triangle atop the newly opened Navigator panel and
Select "Create New Report."
On the far right, select the dropdown triangle and insert a new row.
To the right of the row, select the dropdown triangle and Insert Annotation.
Where the report now says, "type annotation here," type (or copy and paste and edit) the following:

           Your Group Name
            List of Group Members' Names
            MATH 1530 Elements of Statistics
            Project #1: Minitab
            Due Date: (actually type the due date)

NOTE: Be sure to never leave this page unattended, without being busy on here, for more than a few minutes at a time or you may lose everything. If you do need to walk away for more than 10-15 minutes, I highly encourage you to download the current file just in case you come back and are logged out.

To download your current file, select the dropdown triangle in the very center of the top of the page and select the blue "Download" link.

2 - Enter all of the Age data posted in group discussions making sure to enter nothing but numbers in the cells. In other words, if you have dollar signs, dashes, or any special characters, you must remove those.

Enter all of the Status data posted in group discussions being absolutely sure to spell and capitalize everything correctly with no spaces in these cells at all!

3 - Stats, Histograms, and Boxplots: Do Stat > Basic Statistics > Display Descriptive Statistics. Inside variables, select Age. Click on Statistics and additionally check interquartile range, mode, range, and skewness and uncheck N missing and SE of Mean. Press OK once. Click on Graphs. Select Histogram of data and Boxplot of data. Select OK. Select OK again.

This step will give you 1) a histogram, 2) a boxplot, and 3) detailed statistics in the session window for age.

4 - Frequency Tables: Stat > Tables > Tally Individual Variables. Select both Age and Status variables. Display Counts and Percents. Select OK.

Note: Check to make sure that each status value is only listed one time. If you find that a value appears multiple times, this is because of some spacing, spelling, or capitalizing difference in the way you have this value written in your data column. You will want to go through and correct this issue, making each category spelled exactly the same way with exactly the same spacing and capitalization. Then repeat this Step 2.

5 - Pie Chart: Graph > Pie Chart. Leave the counts of unique values selected and select OK. Under categorical variables, choose Status. Select the first dropdown for "Display categorical variables" and choose On separate graphs. Select the Options button and choose "Decreasing area" and, under "label slices with," check "Category name" and "Percent" and click OK and OK.

6 - Construct a normal probability of Age by selecting Graph > Probability Plot. Click on the simple picture and OK. In the box to the left, double-click Age. Click OK.

7 - To standardize, label the C3 column as z. Then select CALC > Standardize, choose Age for input columns, select C3 z for storing results, and click OK.

You should now have new data in the z column, which are the standardized values (z-scores) of every data value listed in age.

8 - Let's do a frequency table for our z-scores: Stat > Tables > Tally Individual Variables. Select the z-score column. Select OK.

9 - Assume ages are normally distributed with a mean equal to the computed sample mean and a standard deviation of equal to the computed sample standard deviation.

Click CALC > Probability Distributions > Cumulative Distribution Function, keep the form of input as single value, the distribution as Normal, and the output as a table of cumulative probabilities. Type the Minitab mean and standard deviation using all output digits in the appropriate boxes. For Value, put all of the digits from the Minitab output representing the first quartile, Q1, of your data. Click OK. The probability will be displayed in the session window.

Repeat using Q3 instead of Q1 as the Value.

Save your project as Project1 (File > Download a copy) and go to where you saved it in your finder or folder. Right-click on the file to rename the file as Project1_GroupName.mpx. Submit only Project1_GroupName.mpx to the Minitab Assignments folder, and triple-check that the file you've loaded says mpx. If the last part is not .mpx, you may not receive credit for the Minitab part.

After loading your file, re-download and open that file that came straight from the Assignments folder to make sure that:

All graphs (scatterplot, probability plot, histograms, bar charts, pie charts) are included,
The worksheet with z-scores is included,
The heading information with your name, date, and so on is included, and
All Minitab analysis is included (frequency tables, descriptive statistics, and two cumulative distribution functions).

Instructions for Report Parts

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Once your Minitab file is submitted, you can start working on the full report.

1 - a) Detail how your group collected the data: exact dates, times, and locations should be given for each survey collection.

b) For the group meeting for Project 1, tell when you met (date and time), where (actual in-person location or technology used to meet online), who met, and for how long.

2 - Answer the following questions clearly so that your answers cannot be misunderstood and so that the reader will not doubt which question you are answering:

PART B: Organizing and Presenting Quantitative & Categorical Data (First Quantitative & First Categorical Variables)

2 - Go to the course in D2L under Tasks and Assignments and Project 1 - Minitab and download the .mpx file to your Downloads folder. Open the Minitab app and open the file you've downloaded from the assignments using the Minitab app. Under your heading in MS Word, copy and paste that variable's frequency table from Minitab, leaving the table completely unaltered.

3 - Copy the statistics row for ages from the Descriptive Statistics in the session window of Minitab, including column headings. No other alterations should be made.

7 - Under that heading, copy and paste the status frequency tables (tallies) from Minitab for Age and Status, leaving the table completely unaltered.

9 - Which measure of central tendency do you think best describes the first categorical variable? Why?

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PART C: Normal Distributions

HINT: Completing Chapter 6 before doing this report part is highly recommended.

In order to use the normal distribution and its associated area under the curve to compute expected percentages or probability, we must assume the data are reasonably normally distributed: unimodal, symmetric, without skew. However, a histogram is not reliable enough when the number of data are small because there may not be a sufficient number of data to construct a histogram. In situations such as these, another graph can be produced: a normal probability plot. This plot is a scatterplot that places your data on one axis and what has already been determined to be normally distributed data on the other axis. If our data line up well with the normally distributed data, we can be safe in assuming our data are also normally distributed. (Hint: Lining up well means that the data form a single, reasonably straight line. Multiple, disconnected lines do not mean that the data line up well.)

1 - Go to the course in D2L under Tasks and Assignments and Project 1 - Minitab and download the .mpx file to your Downloads folder. Open the Minitab app and open the file you've downloaded from the assignments using the Minitab app. Create a bolded heading in MS Word called Normal Distribution. Copy and paste the histogram for ages from Minitab.

2 - Describe this histogram in terms of 1) modality, 2) symmetry, and 3) skewness.

4 - Do the data in this plot line up well with each other in one single line? (Note: Lining up in multiple, perfectly straight lines is not what we are talking about, here. Rather, do the data roughly form one single, approximately straight line?)

5 - Does the normal probability plot indicate the data is normal, approximately normal, or not normal?

6 - Copy and paste the tally for the standardized values (z-scores) from the z column you created.

7 - Using the Empirical Rule's definition of outliers, are any of the data values potentially extreme values (outliers)? If so, which ones are outliers? Explain how you were able to conclude which values were outliers or why you do not have outliers.

8 - Copy and paste the cumulative distribution functions for Q1 and Q3, leaving both completely unaltered from Minitab.

9 - The probability that a data value selected at random would be less than Q1 is ???.

10 - The probability that a data value selected at random would be greater than Q3 is ???.

11 - If the data were perfectly normal, what would the probability be of selecting a data value less than Q1? More than Q3? (Hint: In other words, how much proportion of the data do we expect to be below Q1 and above Q3 by the definitions of Q1 and Q3?)

Have a paragraph at the end detailing what exactly each group member did to contribute to the entire group effort.

After finishing the paper with this final Wrapping It Up paragraph, you will want to add a title page that includes a title for the paper, Math 1530, the date, the name of the group, and a list of the group members. As you put the different parts together, be sure to check for formatting consistency, professionalism, and adherence to the report expectations above (at the top).

Save your MS Word document as Project1_GroupName.doc or Project1_GroupName.docx.

Every group member should open the file straight from the assignments folders to grade the file that is in the assignments folder using the rubric (attached to the folder in D2L's Assignments area), correcting the report for every rubric item based on clarity, accuracy, and completeness. Every group member is responsible for ensuring that the report meets every item in the rubric. After grading and correcting the report, the individual member should post the new draft to group discussions with a list of the major changes made so that an appropriate individual grade may be determined.

The group leader should ensure that the final draft gets loaded to D2L's Project 1 assignments folder well before the final deadline.

Evaluate your peers by submitting one peer review for each member of your group. Individual grades will greatly depend on turning in your own evaluations by the due date and in the evaluations of you by fellow group members.