Frustration into Experimentation Part II

And now for the moment you have all been waiting for - a update on my experiment from my entry titled Frustration into Experimentation. If you have read that entry I'm sure you're sitting at the edge of your seat, your mouth getting dry from anxiousness, the suspense so brutal you just can't take it anymore. If you have not read that entry then read it. If you have not read it and don't want to, fine, I'll sum up. There is a girl in one of my classes that dominates the discussion and I have set up an experiment to quantify just how much she monopolizes the class. Over a period of three weeks I kept count of how many times she spoke out in class, the total amount of class time she spent talking, and the percentage of class time spent having to listen to her. Now for the numbers. If you're a stats person (not many people are) you might enjoy this.

Bear with me as a blog post is not the best place for a data table because of alignment problems. But I'm sure you'll be able to follow anyway. The numbers will be ordered as follows: Number of times subject spoke in one class, total duration of time spoken, percentage of class time spent with subject speaking.

12 1:55 4%

14 3:03 8%
18 1:31 3.5%
6 0:53 2%
10 2:48 7%
15 2:46 6%

Mean = 12.5 2:09 5.7%

Median = 13 2:20:30 5%

Range = 12 2:10 6%

There you have it! Can you imagine being in a 45-50 minute college class and one person who is not the professor speaking this much? I have to admit that the last few days she has gotten better. But not after being on the receiving end of a few comical, not-so-subtle hints from other students that her talking has become excessive. In case you want more, never fear, I am not yet done with this experiment. Next, I will perform these same operations on all the other members of the class combined and do a comparative analysis of the two groups. Thank you for indulging me in this little experiment. I am well on my way to new discoveries in the social sciences.