TITLE

Alemi, Yara

Last Name, First Name

Research question:

Is there a correlation between self-identified race and critical reading score on the SAT?

Data:

Data source:

“What are the average scores for students taking the SAT?.” National Center for Educational Statistics n.pag. IES Institute of Education Sciences. Web. 07 Oct 2012. http://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d11/ch_2.asp.

The webite sourced the U.S. Department of Education, National Center for Education Statistics. (2012). Digest of Education Statistics, 2011 (NCES 2012-001), Table 153.

The fast link to the table is http://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=171

Data collection:

The data was collected at the centralized scoring facility for the SATs. The race marker is collected from the same exam at the same facility and is marked down by the test taker. All the data is in the public domain.

Cases:

Unit of observations are point score on individual section on an exam againt self-identified race

Variables:

The two things I will be looking at will be mean score per race across all the years of the exam, and the section of the exam.

Type of study:

SAT <- read.csv("~/SATR1.csv")
boxplot(SAT$All.students, SAT$White, SAT$Black, SAT$Mexican.American, SAT$Puerto.Rican, 
    SAT$Other.Hispanic, SAT$Asian.Pacific.Islander, SAT$American.Indian.Alaskan.Native, 
    SAT$Other)

## Warning: is.na() applied to non-(list or vector) of type 'NULL'

## Warning: is.na() applied to non-(list or vector) of type 'NULL'

## Warning: is.na() applied to non-(list or vector) of type 'NULL'

1= All student's cummalitive average, 2= Whites, 3=Blacks 4=Mexican Americans, 5= Puerto Rican, 6= Other identifying hispanics 7=Asian Pacific Islander 8=American Indian or Native Alaskan 9= Students identifying as Other
The boxplot allow for easy mean score comparison and are therefore the best way to repersent this data. This data does suggest that certain races will consistently score lower on the Critical Reading portion of the SAT. Only groups 2 and 7 (Whites and Asian Pacific Islanders) had a mean higher than the cumalitive average. After that it decreased, in decending order, 9,6,5,4, to 3.

Data:

A one page print out of my data is attached.