ameeraamber Posted August 21, 2016 Report Share Posted August 21, 2016 hello i need some opinions regarding my math ia. i decided to investigate about the obedience of the preschool children. and my hypothesis is girls is more obedient compared to boys. but i have a problem of analysing my data as i observe their obedience through the designed activity. it is qualitative data. there are 3 activities and if they obediently done all the activities, they will get 3/3. but if they don't do one activity out of 3, they will get 2/3. i decided to do chi squared test but i think it is not enough for my IA. So, i think that i should change my data into quantitative data. so do you have any opinions of turning my qualitative data into quantitative data so that it could be mathematical analyse. thanks Reply Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
azara Posted August 21, 2016 Report Share Posted August 21, 2016 How are you supposed to measure who is obedient, and who is not? Surely there are many levels to being obedient, like doing something lazily and badly vs. trying very hard? Both are being obedient, but one is more obedient than the other. You're right that it's difficult to find a quantitative measure for obedience. Plus, since the children are presumably aware they're participating in an experiment (or an abnormal activity), they will probably act differently to how they would otherwise, which could severely affect the results. I would suggest that you take a different angle. Just as an example, you could collect data on concentration ability (e.g. amount of time the children will do a boring task without complaining, idk lol there are probably ideas on the internet for this) - or obedience, if you can find a suitably quantitative test. Then you can graph that against gender and age, maybe draw some lines of best fit and find their equations and correlation coefficients, etc. etc. - that would satisfy the maths demand of the course, I believe. From there, you describe the trends and why you think they might exist, then explain how teachers or other people who work with young children could find the data helpful. Good luck! Reply Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
IB Math Helper Posted August 21, 2016 Report Share Posted August 21, 2016 I actually think this is a good idea. Basically you're testing if gender is independent of obedience with a chi-square test. Your measure of obedience seems a little simplistic so in your IA you would have to explain the tasks in detail that you give to measure it. Once you have the counts for your three levels of obedience by gender, it's then a simple task of constructing a contingency table and calculating the chi-square statistic. One suggestion: do it for three age groups (i.e. 3 chi-square test for toddlers, middle school and high school students). This will let you test the independence question of these 2 variables over time and give you more to talk about in your discussion. You should also add some discussion on how someone can become more disciplined and obedient in their life by citing suggestions from experts. I don't fully understand your concern with the quantitative part. These two variables (gender and obedience) are categorical but still, the chi-square test is a great tool to measure independence of these 2 variables with enough calculations to merit mathematical understanding. The only thing to remember is that the chi-square is beyond the scope of the Math SL curriculum so you would have to explain in detail WHY you need it and HOW it works to get high marks on Criterion E (Mathematical Understanding). Reply Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
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