Week 8: We're getting there :)

Welcome back, you quiet quails!

I hope you guys have been well since we last saw each other on week 7’s blogs! As we are approaching the end of this senior project, I can finally say that so far, this project has been perfectly on track to finish in time, even through all the setbacks we faced. Even with the surveys being delayed, the assembly getting pushed back two weeks, and some students being unable to take all the surveys (which I will touch on shortly), we have pushed through and are now ready to begin work on our final products. It’s been a long 7 weeks, but honestly, I’m really proud of how far we’ve come 🙂

Anyways, this week was mostly focused on data analysis, creating graphs, and continuing work on my research paper. As some of you may remember, I already worked on the literature review and the intro to my research paper while waiting to collect data during weeks 2 and 3, and now, we’ve officially begun work on the rest of the paper. However, while this is a big step forward, the paper itself was only a small part of my work this week, as most of the week was focused on everyone’s favorite data analysis!

I’ve honestly had a ton of fun analyzing the results of the pre-assembly and post-assembly surveys so far, and some of these results are genuinely surprising. One common issue I am running into, however, is that due to our small sample size, a lot of our results are insignificant. While this issue was ultimately unavoidable, as we did the best we could to recruit students given the constraints we had, it does suck knowing that maybe if we had a larger sample size, our results could be more concrete. However, while it is annoying right now, I think this is just motivating me to continue pursuing this topic in the future with larger sample sizes. Especially since this project gave me a good idea of how to conduct this sort of experiment in the future, I hope that I can someday conduct this same style of experiment on a much larger scale. 

Another thing I got up to this week was creating the figures for my senior project. This included graphs of the control vs experimental group, demographic changes in score, and graphs comparing specific subgroups to one another. These figures will not only help me clearly show my data in a physical, easy-to-understand form, but also make my presentation look a bit better, and that’s always fun.

For this upcoming week, the goal is to finish around 75% of my research paper. While it may be difficult, I have already begun planning and documenting all my findings, so I think it’s a very doable goal. Especially considering I already finished the literature review, the part that usually takes me the most time, I think we’re in a good place. Overall, though, I’m really excited to continue seeing how my project develops, and I’ll see you on the flip side, you radical rabbits!