To Read or Not to Read, That's the Question

The purpose of this study is to determine if the scores of College Entrance exams for students at North Olmsted High school is related to the number of books they read.

In order to proceed in this line of question, we took a simple random sample of 150 juniors and seniors of North Olmsted High school. Hundred and fifty surveys were sent out asking for the number of books read per semester as well as their College Entrance Exams’ test scores. Out of these 150 surveys only 60 surveys were returned with all the required information.

These numbers were entered into Minitab and paired up to create a scatter plot to see if they had a linear relationship. We further delved into the study by conducting a linear regression t-test for both ACT and SAT scores. Both the linear regression t-tests were against the null hypothesis that the slope of the least squares line of each was equal to 0.

Upon completing the tests, we discovered that we were unable to reject the null hypothesis for the ACT, but we were able to do so for SAT. Therefore, we can say that there is a linear relationship between the number of books read and SAT scores.

Although it looks like our study is perfect, believe it or not, we had a couple of flaws. To begin with non-response bias was evident and there is also a possibility that the results may have been mendacious. One of the confounding variables would be the intensity of the English classes that the students are taking. This could have affected our results as well. So be aware of these flaws when you further proceed into our study.