Discussion of the Study
We cannot extrapolate our results, as this study is specific to North Olmsted High School. The parking lot layout, school dismissal methods, and driving student population observed in this study are not necessarily the same as other schools. These variables will strongly affect how long it takes students to flow out of the parking lot.Problems with the study include: One of our data collection days coincided with the Cedar Point physics field trip. The data we obtained from this day continued the trend that we were already seeing, as the change in population size was not very large. Thus, we included the data in our study. Additionally, there was a group of seniors loitering in their cars after we recorded them which made for multiple outliers on one particular day. Thus, we removed these outliers from our final data.
Suggestions for further study: We need a better method of tracking people in the parking lot. It was very easy to lose track of people after they were spotted leaving the building. Thus, if we had more people to help observe people leaving the parking lot, our data collection would have been more consistent. This would in turn give a higher sample size, which would make the data easier to interpret and more reliable.