Light at the End of the Tunnel – Monica Martinez

Hey guys! Travel from whatever else you were spending you lovely day to the M&S world for a bit. Just wanted to give you guys a little update on how we are doing as a team and the research that we have been accomplishing for the past dates. Last time we spoke we were giving you all an update on the requirements that we had to have done in order to complete our deliverable (Which turned out great btw!). There were a couple of changes that needed to be made like any research proposal that our lovely instructor, Ella Miesner, poitnted out. My partner, Sabrina, and I completely forgot that we did not specify what we were exactly testing. When writing a research proposal we had no idea how crucial it was with the sort of vocabulary you use. You need to be very very very specify! I mean we did say that we were testing the correlation between the amount of assignments due and the blood pressure, but in the graphs that we had our participants fill out most of them just estimated the amount of work they felt like they had to do that day. You can see where the issue here is right? We said we were testing one thing and then ended up testing something else! Ugh! So any who we had to change “the amount of assignments due” to “Perceived amount of workload on a scale from one to ten”. We also included before a section where the participants had to fill out any medication alcohol or drugs consumed. We decide to include this section in case we saw results that did not go according to our hypothesis and possibly use these as reasoning. Ms. Miesner, though, argued that would have to include a whole separate level of confidentiality. After thinking about it for some time we agreed because we honestly did not have sufficient time to take all of these factors into consideration. Make- O- Rama is just a few weeks away!

After the Research proposal was fixed and the patient data charts were re-made, we managed to continue our research.  As a nice little treat we gave our participants cookies as an incentive for their participation (Which we later got in trouble, but let’s not get caught up in the details). We collected data that would only include their age, their perceived amount of school workload due the day of the test, and their blood pressure. At the end of every class period Sabrina and I would copy the participants information into an electronic file, as well as graph the participants data into an excel spread sheet. Last class period was our last data collecting period (Participants were kind of angry when we did not give them the cookies that we said we would.. ), meaning that now we get to do the exiting part of this project. We get to analyze our data! After we are done concluding our findings we will demonstrate our research in a pretty poster and show it at our Make-O-Rama. You guys should totally come to the Ann Richards School and see what we found! Hope to see you guys soon!