Wood

Lucy Wood
The Stats in Action Project
Do you believe you will travel abroad
in one of your collegiate years?
Hypothesis: On average, senior girls
will be more likely to travel abroad in
college than senior girls.

AP Statistics
Kiker Pd. 6
December 4, 2014

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Travel is something almost everybody is interested in. Growing up, not everyone
has the time or opportunity to travel around the world and sight see. Luckily, for those
that didnt get a chance to travel as a child, college gives one last opportunity to students.
Many college students travel abroad for either a semester or a full year during their
sophomore or junior year. Traveling abroad teaches the students first hand about the
specific country and its culture. Not only this but it also gives them a more global
perspective and an overall great experience. I focused on asking high school seniors, both
in AGS and not in AGS, if they believed that they would travel abroad while studying in
college. I at first believed that boys and girls would have different takes on traveling
abroad, but was surprised by the responses of each gender. Before collecting my data, I
was convinced that the females were going to respond more positively, saying that they
were planning on traveling abroad, than the males because females, I assumed, are
usually more outgoing when it comes to learning experiences and stepping out of their
comfort zones.
When thinking about this data collection, I assumed that I would need to collect
responses from all seniors in high school, seeing as they are all about to go to college and
have most likely been thinking about the possibility of traveling abroad. I knew that I
wouldnt be able to ask every senior in the school, so I narrowed down my sample to only
forty seniors. In order to collect my data, I first got a list of all students in the school.
With that list, I went through and highlighted the female seniors in a pink font, and the
male seniors in a blue font. Then, starting at the very top of the list, I went through and
numbered each senior boy off, in alphabetical order, from 1 until 251. I then started up at
the top of the list again, and numbered each senior girl, alphabetically, from 1 to 231.

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After numbering each gender, I got a random number table and split it up into three digit
numbers. Using the random number table, I randomly selected 20 boys and 20 girls. With
my random sample of 20 boys and 20 girls, I went and looked up all of their schedules
and sent a survey to their second period classes for them to fill out. On this survey, they
were asked if they believe that they will travel abroad in college or not. If they answered
Yes, a follow up question was asked; they were asked to state what interested them
most about traveling abroad and where they wanted to go. If they answered No, the
follow up question asked them to explain why they believe they wont travel abroad.
I came across a few difficulties when collecting my data, however. My first
difficulty was going through and highlighting every senior. Because I had to do that
manually, it is very possible that I may have accidentally skipped over a senior or two
because I might not have seen them. That being said, that would have made my
randomization a little less random because not every senior had an equal opportunity of
being randomly selected. My next obstacle that I faced was going through the two large
binders of everyones schedules and finding their second period class. This step was very
tedious, and took a lot of time and dedication to do. Some of my students didnt have a
second period class that was accessible for me to give a survey in, one including culinary.
Because of this, I had to give the survey to them in a different period, which made my job
a little bit harder. My last obstacle was going around to each teacher the morning that I
gave out my surveys, and asking them, politely, if they would be willing to give the
particular students their surveys. All of the teachers were happy to do it, but it was
tracking them down that was the difficult part. I ran around the school, going up and
down flights of stairs, looking for the classrooms of these teachers. Most of the teachers

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didnt arrive until after 8:40, so I just kept walking from class to class, waiting for them
to show up. Finally, I was able to find them all, but worked up a sweat doing so.
In my research, I had to implement the principles of experimental design. The
three principles of experimental design are control, replication of the experiment, and
randomization. The control in my project was that I was asking every one of my subjects
the same question. In order to successfully compare the responses of the high school
seniors, everybody was asked the same question so that the answers were not extremely
different, making it harder to asses the data collected. If I had asked multiple different
questions, then my data would not have accurately depicted the seniors thoughts on
travel abroad. The second principle of experimental design is the replication of the
experiment on many subjects. My projects sample is 40 out of about 500 Austin High
seniors. About of them were in the Academy of Global Studies. I decided to ask this
amount because I wanted to stay in the 10% rule, which would have been 50 students, but
also had to be above 30. I decided to settle in the middle and got this number because it
was easy to split in half and have an even amount of boys and an even amount of girls.
The last principle of experimental design is randomization. As I described above, in order
to get my sample, I used a random number table to select the twenty boys and twenty
girls I surveyed. I wanted this experiment to be completely random because I wanted my
data collection and proportions to be as accurate as it possibly could. Even though I only
used Austin High students, I believe my use of randomization helped get an overall better
understanding of what many high school seniors see themselves doing in college,
whether it be traveling abroad or not.

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My original hypothesis was that there would be a lot more girls that would be
interested in traveling abroad than boys. I was surprised to see that this was not the case.
My sample of twenty girls was completely split in half. Ten of the girls I surveyed
answered that they would be traveling abroad and ten of the girls answered that they
would not be traveling abroad. Not only was I surprised by the girls answers, but also I
was pleasantly surprised by the answers of the boys. I believed that most of the boys
would say No, mostly because of my assumption that boys arent as willing to try
something out of their comfort zone as girls are. This assumption was very incorrect
because it turned out to be the opposite. My data collection showed that more boys
believed they wanted to travel abroad. My numbers, however, werent significant enough
to say that all overall boys will travel abroad more often than girls. 25% of my sample
was girls that said they would travel abroad in college and 27.5% of my sample was boys
saying that they would travel abroad in college. Those two percentages were too close
together to say that more boys would travel abroad in college than girls.

Do You Want To Travel Abroad?

12
10
8
6
4
2
0
Boy Yes

Girl Yes

Boy No

Girl No

The bar chart above is a visual representation of my data. Like I said earlier, 25%
of my sample consisted of Yes girls, 27.5% of my sample consisted of Yes boys,

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25% of my sample consisted of No girls, and 22.5% of my sample consisted of No

boys. That being said, it was almost completely evenly split, both between genders and
between specific answers.
Of course, like in any given sets of data, there are possibly some confounding
variables. One confounding variable that could be present in my data collection is what
some senior students are interested in studying. When asked why they wanted to either
study abroad or not, many Yes students, both boys and girls, responded saying that
they wanted to experience new cultures. A few of those students expanded and said that
they would be interested in traveling to a Spanish speaking country because they want to
become fluent in Spanish. However, one male that responded with No explained that
he didnt want to travel abroad because he wanted to focus on his major and not get
distracted by the cultures of another country. Another boy that responded with No
explained that he wants to focus more on school because the engineering curriculum
requires many credits at the actual university. He also said that he didnt think it was
practical for him because there arent as many opportunities to get those credits while
studying abroad. While many people might want to study abroad, they might not be able
to because it wouldnt have anything to do with what they are going to study. Another
confounding variable is financial reasons. Almost every single student who circled No
explained that the reason they wont travel abroad is because it is very expensive. If
money wasnt a factor that had to be considered for those wishing to travel abroad, I truly
believe I would have had a majority of students say Yes and that they would travel
abroad. Traveling anywhere is very expensive and many people arent fortunate enough
to be able to fund their children to go travel abroad and learn first-hand the cultures of

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another country. If traveling abroad were free, more students would take the opportunity
to do so, without a doubt. Unfortunately, it is not free; so many students wont get the
chance to travel the world and experience new cultures.
All in all, my data revealed that my hypothesis was wrong. Girls are not more
likely to travel abroad than boys. In fact, its almost completely even. This most likely
has to do with the different fields of study each senior is taking part in, and also the
interest of each individual student. My data made it apparent that gender really does not
play a role in the likelihood of a senior traveling abroad in college or not, it is really just
the individual persons preference. Many of the students who claimed that they would be
taking up the opportunity to explore the world wanted to do this because they wanted to
have a change in scenery and try something new and different. They mentioned that this
would open up their perspectives and would let them have a one-of-a-kind experience.
However, many of the students who claimed that they would not be traveling abroad said
that it was either too expensive or it didnt interest them enough to actually go out and
organize. These reasons, for both wanting to go and not wanting to go, didnt have to do
with gender at all, but merely personal preference. This survey taught me a lot about my
classmates. I originally thought that every person in AGS would answer Yes, that they
did want to travel abroad. However, just like the comparison of boys and girls, it was
almost completely equal. Half of the AGS students I surveyed answered Yes and half
of the AGS students answered No. This made me realize that it really is almost half of
the students going into college that will travel abroad, no matter what their age, gender,
or previous activities; its all about what they want to get out of college.

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DATA
Appendix A: Data Collection
Gender
Boy
Girl
Girl
Boy
Girl
Girl
Girl
Boy
Boy
Boy
Girl
Girl
Girl
Boy
Girl
Boy
Girl
Girl
Boy
Boy
Boy
Girl
Boy
Girl
Boy
Gilr
Girl
Boy
Boy
Boy
Boy
Boy
Boy
Girl
Girl
Boy
Boy
Girl
Girl
Girl

Name
Robert Aleman
Madison Beathard
Lizzette Benitez
Davis Booth
Angelica Calderon
Victoria Callaway
Alex Cameron
Rudy Debellis
Chase Durand
Jacob Estrada
Cadelia Evans
Jazzmine Garcia
Vanessa Garcia
Madison Garni
Talaifa Gilford
Jacob Hartzer
Madeline Hastings
Rachel Hatton
Noah Hazle
Patrick Householder
Foster Keene
Anne-Marie Kolb
Lat Kuykendall
Zoe Larrimore
Tyler Laws
Emily Mawer
Athena Mills
Adrian Moreno
Zachary Morgan
Tobias Perkins
Preston Pine
Ethan Ross
Fernando Schwartz
Ana Szachacz
Claudia Taylor
Cody Tran
David Tran
Madison Tumicki
Emma Van Hees
Sarah Weeks

Yes or No
Yes
Yes
No
No
No
No
Yes
Yes
Yes
Yes
No
No
No
No
Yes
Yes
Yes
No
Yes
Yes
No
No
Yes
Yes
No
Yes
No
Yes
Yes
No
Yes
No
No
Yes
Yes
No
No
Yes
Yes
No

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Appendix B: Signatures (Pictures of each signature on the surveys)