JIHWAN KIM, CHANWOO KIM AISC AP Statistics
CHENNAI STATISTICS TIMES
How Should We
Study To
MAXIMIZE Our
Academic
Performance?
Introduction & Experimental Procedures
As human beings, we all want to succeed
to score high on academic tests. However,
many teenagers oftentimes struggle to
find the best method that fits them. The
trick is that we must study smart, not
hard. That is, staying up late and
cramming a day before the test do not
guarantee success. So the question is To conduct the experiment, the AISC
“Through what ways and methods can we High School population was divided into
study smart and maximize our scores? two strata: AP Calc A2 class and AP Calc
B6 class using stratified random
To answer this question, AP Statistics sampling. This specific sampling method
professors Jihwan Kim and Chanwoo Kim was used to reduce variability among
from the American International School groups and to make group more
Chennai conducted a fascinating homogeneous. Then, for each student in
experiment with 24 AP Calculus students. both A2 and B6 classes, we assigned
Professors Jihwan and Chanwoo numbers, and we selected every 3rd to
hypothesized that taking practice tests be in specific groups using systematic
and being exposed to similar practice random sampling (n=3). That is, students
problems rather than reviewing notes with number 1, 4, 7, 10, etc were in
would lead to better academic review notes group, students with
performance on the summative number 2, 5, 8, 11, etc were in practice
assessments. tests and so on.
Treatment:
Review notes
or practice
problems for
5 minutes
before taking
the final test.
Raw data from the experiment
Pictures of the participants
Data Analysis:
Based on the left table, it is evident that the
mean, median (the central tendency ) increase
when we compare the academic performance
of placebo group to notes or practice tests
group. This essentially confirms our hypothesis
because more practice tests and problems AP
Calc students solve, the better their academic
performance on the final test. In this case, both
mean and median can be used as the central
tendency because there is no significantly
deviating outlier and data is relatively
symmetric other than the placebo group
(skewed to the right, median closer to Q1).
However, it is important to note IQR value of 0
for notes and median overlapping with Q1,
which could have been caused due to
unintended errors/potential bias. Because the
box plot does not display the means, we’ve
also created a bar chart to demonstrate how
the mean increases as AP Calc students do
more practice problems.
Conclusion & Evaluation
This experiment clearly confirmed that practice tests, or at least
reviewing notes, are essential to succeed academically. However,
there have been some errors. For instance, the IQR of placebo group
was higher than the IQR of experimental group (notes, practice), which
indicates a high variability in experiment that we missed. Additionally,
because other stats experiments also happened in the same room,
this could’ve lowered students’ concentrations. Of course, students’
day-to-day conditions, sleep, whether they had lunch or not also
impacted the experiment’s findings.
