Gender and Student’s Grades Essay

I decided to choose to do my project on if the gender of the teacher reflects what the student gets in the class. I am interested in this because I feel that a male teacher, for me, does a better job teaching. They have a stronger personality and are louder which keeps you listening. I chose to do this project because I am interested in seeing how the average student feels compared to how I feel. In order to collect my data, I will test a total of 10 classes, 2 classes from the following subjects; Algebra 2 regular, Chemistry Honors, IB History, Media Arts, and English 10 Honors. One class will be from a male teacher and the other from a female teacher. I will the split the classes into two groups male and female. In the two groups I will categorize the 5 classes into what the student got in the class. There will be 5 categories A, B, C, D, and F. Since I only want 5 columns I will round the A-‘s, B-‘s, C-‘s, and D-‘s to a regular letter grade. As well as the A+’s, B+’s, C+’s and D+’s to a regular letter grade. After obtaining all the data, I will begin to compare and analyze the data. First, I will do a simple process by finding the mean, median, and mode of the two groups. Since my data is in letter grades I will have to change the letters to a GPA. For example an A would be a 4, also since I am rounding the A-‘s to A’s an A- would also be a 4. Finding the mean, median and mode will show what the average grades are in the male and female classes. That data can be compared easily to show what grades are getting in which gender class. Another simple mathematical process is making a histogram. Each category (A, B, C, D, and F) will have two bars coming from it, one male and one female. This can show how many of the each letter grade is coming from each gender. It will visually show what gender is getting what grades in the classes. The last mathematical procedure I will be doing is a Chi-squared table which will be my sophisticated process. This will be my most accurate calculation to show if gender of the teacher is dependent on the grade the student gets in class. I am going to make  ·this table by splitting the date into two columns, male and female, and then by the grade the student got in the class. When making the histogram for one of my simple processes I added all the A’s together from the male classes then all the B’s and so forth. I did this for the female classes as well. For the graph my x-axis is the grade, y-axis is the number of students in the column. There are two bars coming up from each grade group to show the comparison between male and female. Calculating the Chi-squared of this data will be my last process. To find the Chi-squared I had to make a table with all the grades in it and which gender it was for. I then had to find the expected value, an example of this was multiplying the total number from the male column and the A column then dividing that by the total of grades overall. After getting the observed and expected tables I subtracted the observed from the expected then square rooted this then divided it by the expected. I did this for each column. Then the numbers were added together to get a chi-squared of 4.88. I used the rejection inequality given a significance level of 5%. To find the p-value I put my calculations into my graphing calculator to get a p-value of 0.363. I then found the degrees of freedom by subtracting the rows by the columns. This was able let me know which significance level to use which is 9.488. Since the chi-squared was false, you accept the null. Some of the errors I saw in my project were the classes I chose, Mrs. Mel and Mr. Nichols were an IB History class. An IB History class is a higher knowledge class, all of the students in these two classes got either an A or a B. Since everyone had higher grades this made an error in my project because two of my classes did not have three of the letter grades. This skewed my grades toward higher GPA’s. I should have chosen a class that had more variety in grades. Another thing that made an error in my project was when I did the mean, median, and mode I rounded the grades. For instance a B- would be a B and a B+ would be a B. Rounding these grades made the variety not as big. Since students work well with different teachers another way to do this project which would give me more accurate data would be to compare a student who switched teachers between the two semesters from a male to a female. This would have showed more how a certain student acts with different genders rather than how a group of students acts. In conclusion, it shows that the gender of the teacher and the grade the students gets in that class are independent. The x ² calc was less than the critical value. The results I saw were similar to what I thought would happen. All though the calculations were not as accurate as I would have liked them to be and the conclusion is very vague to what I thought would have happened. This does change how I feel about gender affecting the student because I felt like the male was more of an effective teacher than a female but the calculations show the female is more effective.