Final Project Presentation Schedule (and some advice/guidelines)

Names are alphabetical; but presentation order on each date is flexible. ALSO, if you are prepared to present early AND we have time before the end of class, you can present before your scheduled day. (This could give you more time to work on your final paper, or, finish it earlier.)
April 9 [T] C. Bosack
C. Giovannelli
April 11 [Th] A. Brown
H. Croyle
A. Dudek
April 16 [T] B. Naughton
B. Scalise
April 18 [Th] TBA
TBA

Guidelines & Advice
  • Presentations should be NO MORE than 20 minutes long (there is simply NOT enough time to allow everyone to present otherwise).
  • You will be docked 5 percent of your presentation grade for every minute (or fraction) you go over the time limit!
  • So, I will cut you off at the 30-minute mark (i.e., once you've lost 50% of your grade) to keep things moving and save time for others.

  • Strategy Tip: Start with ONLY what you need help with, and designs can be discussed in ANY order you want = start with the one you need the most help with!

  • Strategy Tip: Have your PowerPoint slideshow ready to go on a USB drive, or, email it to me so I can have it waiting on the computer desktop to run right away. Don't waste your time finding and setting up your presentation!

  • IMPORTANT: Final presentation grades include TWO parts:
    1. The presentation grade = 10 pts
    2. Participation in others' presentations = 20 pts
EXAMPLE
Research Question: What are the effects (if any) of room-color on algebra performance?

Three Tiered Research Plan

  1. Experiment: Randomly assign 50 students to one of three different room colors for algebra class.

    • I am actually stuck here, because I don't know if I should use the same three boring colors from my other two designs (white, beige, and yellow), or, use three new colors.

  2. Non-Experiment: Chi-square examination of grades vs. room color at 10 different schools.

    • Find 10 different local colleges/universities.
    • See what all the algebra classroom colors are.
    • Count the number of each final grade-type.
    • Perform a chi-square test to find any differences in proportion of grades across the classroom colors.

  3. Quasi-Experiment: Compare different grade-levels across different room colors at 10 different schools.

    • See how students do in the different colored classrooms according to if they are freshmen, sophomores, juniors, or seniors.
    • This would be a 3x4 between subjects ANOVA.
    • Dependent variable will be final grade.

POSSIBLE CLASS RESPONSES
  1. Experiment:

    • If you use the same three colors, that would help with external validity, right?
    • But he could also use new colors to see if more extreme colors give better results than the traditional boring colors. So we might learn something new.

  2. Non-Experiment:

    • Do you need to count the number of letter grades? Isn't that a weaker type of data than if you got the class averages? Then you could do ANOVA instead of chi-square.
    • It doesn't seem like the classroom colors are much different. Are you worried that could be a limitation?
    • Why didn't you go with a correlation between color and grade instead?

  3. Quasi-Experiment:

    • What if you do not get enough students in each grade level?
    • What would you predict the outcome to be?

IMPORTANT: Please do not ask questions merely to ask questions. We don't want to take away any class time that would otherwise have been needed by the people who have yet to present.