Numbers 1.5 and 1.6

So it's pretty obvious I have been avoiding these two assignments for a while now.  I saved them for my very last post because I despise Excel so much.

Numbers 1.5
In this pre-post study a group of pharmacy students took a survey about Ebola, then sat through an information session on Ebola and took the survey again.  In this study the dependent variable is student's knowledge of Ebola, and the independent variable is the group of students.  There are not two different groups of students, however since the students were surveyed at two different times (pre and post) we are able to compare them since they are "related groups".  We are testing to see if the information session had any impact on the student's knowledge about Ebola.

Results:
To determine if the information session on Ebola had an effect on the student's knowledge I performed a t-test to compare the pre and post test scores.  This test calculates a p score.  If the p score is less than 5% (<.05) then the results are statistically significant.

For question 26 the results are statistically significant.

For question 27 the results are not statistically significant.

For question 28 the results are not statistically significant.

For question 29 the results are statistically significant.

For question 30 the results are not statistically significant.

For question 31 the results are statistically significant.

The Ebola information session made a statistically significant different in student's knowledge for 3 questions, but there was not a statistical difference between the pre and post test for the other 3 questions on the survey.

Here is a link to my results.

Numbers 1.6

This set of data compares 4th grade reading scores for both black and Hispanic students from each state.

Independent variable = Race

Dependent variable = NAEP reading scores for 4th grade

Hypothesis

H1    There is a statically significant difference between the NAEP mean scores of Black and Hispanic students on the 4th grade reading assessment.

H0: There is no difference between the mean scores.(null hypothesis)

Results:
I conducted a two-tailed t-test using the online calculator http://studentsttest.com/, which gave me a p score of 0.0023. That means that there is a statistically significant difference between Hispanic and Black students.

So as much as I hate how tedious calculating descriptive statistics and conducting t tests can be, I can honestly say I feel a lot more comfortable doing it. I also know how to find and write functions that are not preset in Excel with more ease than when I began this semester.

Infographic

They say a picture is worth a thousand words, thus infographics are gaining popularity quickly.  An infographic visually represents any combination of data and text someone wishes to convey.  The topics for infographics are endless.  

Here are some examples:

I love the idea of having students create an infographic that summarizes a research article.  It is a great way to alternatively assess if students understand what they read about.  So here is the infographic I created to summarize this article.

This was probably the most challenging assignment of the semester for me mostly because I needed to figure out what tools to use.  I began in pinterest by searching for examples of infographics, which lead to some research on how to create an infographic.  Ironically I found an infographic about how to make an infographic!

After doing a lot of research and creating some charts to use. I decided to use the google drawing application to compose my infographic.  Using this tool made it very easy after that.  I was also excited to figure out how to embed my image in this post!

I believe that infographics fall in the redefinition stage of the SAMR model.  While the technology used to create infographics is not in the redefinition stage infographics themselves are.  Creating infographics allows us to capture a great deal of statistics, facts, and graphics in one quick image.  People today are more likely to read an infographic than an entire research article, thus creating an infographic instead of writing an article is redefining these tasks.