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The Life and Times of a CCA Teacher

The Life and Times of a CCA Teacher. Excellent Students #1, 2, 3. Introduction. We did a survey on teachers Why? In order to learn about teachers’ views, rather than the students’, which we already have a general idea about. Survey sent to a random sample of CCA teachers

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The Life and Times of a CCA Teacher

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  1. The Life and Times of a CCA Teacher Excellent Students #1, 2, 3

  2. Introduction • We did a survey on teachers • Why? In order to learn about teachers’ views, rather than the students’, which we already have a general idea about. • Survey sent to a random sample of CCA teachers • Covered a number of different topics, relating primarily to education.

  3. SRS • Listed teachers in alphabetical order 1 —78 • Used Table B to acquire two digit numbers randomly • Numbers >78 and repeats weeded out. • 30 teachers used for SRS, 10 backups were sent out as well

  4. Literature Review Facts • In the US, the average student:teacher ratio is 15.5 students per teacher, varies with each state. In CCA, though, the student:teacher ratio is 34:1. • About 88% of secondary teachers nationwide have at least a bachelor’s degree, while about 50% held a degree higher than bachelor’s • Average amount of teaching experience for a secondary teacher was about 17-18 years of teaching.

  5. Question 1: What department do you teach in? • No teachers in the social studies or PE departments responded to our survey. • Math, English, and Envision comprised the largest part of the sample. • It doesn’t seem like teachers in any particular department are less amenable to taking surveys; we’ll talk more about this later.

  6. Question 2: For how many years have you been teaching high school? • The sample mean was 6.389, while the median was 5 – when the mean is greater than the median, the sample is skewed right, as can be seen from the histogram. • Every teacher in the sample had less experience than the national average (17 years), which is to be expected, since CCA is a new school.

  7. Question 3: How many high schools have you taught at? • By a large margin, the mode for this question was 2. • Why? Most of the teachers were probably recently transferred from another school within the district.

  8. Question 4: List all college degrees that you have obtained. • A majority of teachers in our sample achieved the BA college degree. BS, MA, and M.Ed degrees were achieved in smaller proportions, and only one each had an MS or PHD. • 17/18 = 94.5% of responders had some degree, compared to an 88% national average. • “Other” responses included M.Phil, AA, BFA, and 2 BAs.

  9. Question 5: Why did you choose to become a high-school teacher? (Check all applicable.)

  10. Question 6: Why did you choose to come to CCA? • There were two other choices on the survey itself: “I needed the money, and the district happened to hire me,” and “I had colleagues at CCA.” Neither of these was ever chosen.

  11. Question 7: Rate the overall quality of the following aspects of CCA.

  12. Question 8:As a high school student, how often did you... • Most teachers admitted to at least occasionally procrastinating, 1/3 said often • Most teachers either played sports “All the time” or “Never,” with no “Sometimes” responses. • The teachers on the most part had fairly positive reviews of their high school experience.

  13. Question 9: During classtime...

  14. Question 10: On average, how many students do you teach per class? • The average number of students in a classroom in our sample was 33 kids. • We saw earlier that the CCA average was 34 students:teacher, so our sample isn’t much different from this.

  15. Question 11: On average, how many hours per week... • On average, teachers claimed to spend 3.28 hours more than their students on work. • However, upon reviewing the question, a discrepancy appears • first question asks teachers to give the time they spend grading all student work • second question asks for the average time spent on just homework

  16. Question 12: Per week, CCA students spend... • It’s a bit worrisome that, on average, the teachers at CCA believe students don’t spend enough time doing homework • On outside activities, most teachers thought that the students spend the right amount of time on extracurriculars and very few do not spend enough time • In other words… CCA teachers think we sleep too much. Hmm.

  17. Question 13: Overall, how satisfied are you with teaching at CCA? • The results for this question were very skewed to the left (which is good). • Only one teacher responded that they were at all unsatisfied.

  18. Confidence Intervals • μ = average hours/week grading homework • Normality: n = 18 < 30, so we cannot use Central Limit Theorem to say that since the sample size is large enough, we can assume a roughly Normal sampling distribution. The histogram below also obviously shows a right skewed distribution. Since there are no major outliers, it is safe to assume normality as long as well proceed with caution that these results may not be completely accurate. • Independence: 10n ≤ N  10(18) = 180 ≤ N There are less than 180 teachers at CCA. Proceed with caution • SRS: This is an SRS. • There is 95% confidence that the real average hours/week grading homework is between the interval

  19. Two-Variable Stats • We had a number of hypotheses as to how different variables might be related. For instance, we figured that the amount of time a teacher spent grading student work would be more or less proportional to the amount of time students spent doing it. • x = hours/week spent grading work • y = (hours/week)/student spent doing homework • r = .253 • ŷ = 2.947 + 1.76x • r2 = .064 is very low, so there is not a strong correlation between hours/week spent grading homework and (hours/week)/student spent doing homework, which is pretty weird.

  20. Two-Variable Stats • Displayed left is a two-way table of the responses to parts B and C of Question 8. (None of the teachers responded “Never” when asked how often they enjoyed being in school.) • Using conditional probability, we can analyze the table • E.g. “Often” or “All the time” given that they never played sports was 4/5 = 0.8, while the probability that they did so given that they played sports often was 7/10 = 0.7  fairly close, not large impact

  21. Chi-Squared: Response Rate by department • One thing we knew would be a factor from the beginning was voluntary response. • Despite measures taken to improve it (aka guilt-tripping and begging), we still got a measly 45% response rate. We decided to statistically analyze this to see which teachers to blame. • Chose to analyze the possibility that a teacher’s department affected the likelihood that they would respond to the survey, i.e. math teachers more likely since they would appreciate the purpose of the survey more.

  22. Response Rate/Chi-Squared • Our hypotheses are • H0: the distribution of survey responders is the same as the distribution of the SRS by department, and • HA: At least one of the listed proportions is significantly different. • The chi-squared test requires that all expected values be above 1 and no more than 25% below 5, so we proceed with caution.

  23. Response Rate/Chi-Squared • We have 8 categories, so we use the chi-squared distribution with df = 7 • P(chi2 > 7.522) = .377 • This is a very high P-value, meaning that there is no significant deviation from the expected values. We fail to reject the H0 that no department’s teachers are more or less likely to respond.

  24. Significance TestsQuestion 10 • T-significance tests were done to see whether or not the sample proved that CCA student: teacher ratio did not follow the previously found statistics and were statistically significant evidence that the previous statistics do not apply to the current CCA the average student: teacher ratio. • μ = average student: teacher ratio • Normality: n = 18 < 30, so we cannot use Central Limit Theorem The histogram above also obviously shows a left skewed distribution. T-tests are fairly robust, so we have normality as long as no outliers are present. • Independence: 10n ≤ N  10(18) = 180 ≤ N There are fewer than 180 teachers at CCA. Proceed with caution • SRS: This is an SRS.

  25. H0: μ = 21.3HA: μ ≠ 21.3 The p-value <.05 so we can reject the null hypothesis. Therefore we can safely conclude that there is strong evidence that the average student: teacher ratio at CCA is not 21.3:1, which the average student: teacher ratio is in the California. Significance TestsQuestion 10

  26. Discussion • Teachers were a bit unconcerned with the trivial matters of students outside their own classroom  less than half our sample responded • We could not assume normality of our sample using the Central Limit Theorem (sample size must be at least 30) • Because of the small sample size, we may have not been able to notice correlations more prominent in a larger sample • The survey questions were all well thought-out and collaborated upon

  27. Conclusion • Throughout this project, we both exercised our statistical skills and learned more about the opinions of our fellow teachers • We developed an informative survey of our sample of teachers, most of which didn’t reply • Our results were informative

  28. Bibliography • Kohn, Brian. "Canyon Crest Academy School Profile." 18 Jan. 2009 <http://teachers.sduhsd.net/cccounseling/documents/0809CCAprofile.pdf>. • "Pupil/Teacher Ratio (most recent) by state." StateMaster - US Statistics, State Comparisons. 18 Jan. 2009 <http://www.statemaster.com/graph/edu_ele_sec_pup_rat-elementary-secondary-pupil-teacher-ratio>. • “Public Secondary School Teacher Survey on Vocational Education.” 18 Jan. 2009 http://nces.ed.gov/surveys/frss/publications/94409/

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