Methods of Applied Statistics
Mogan-Vallon/Klein
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Assignment: The Onion Root Growth Experiment

Question: Do pollutants in water have an adverse effect on the root growth of plants?

Reading: Read about water pollutants.  Use the links Prof. Klein has set up within the folder Lab 2: Effect of Water Pollution on Root Growth on our Blackboard Site.

1.      Which water pollutants can we reasonably test within our laboratory?  How might we test them?

2.      You have 100 onion seedlings to plant.  Devise a method to draw a simple random sample of 20 plants from this population of 100.

3.      Devise a way to randomly assign each plant to one of 5 different sample sets.

4.      List the qualitative and/or quantitative data you will be measuring.

5.      List the sample statistics you will be calculating.

6.      What population parameters correspond to your statistics?

7.      List the explanatory and response variables for the root onion experiment.

8.      List the possible confounding variables.

9.      Devise a way to eliminate the confounding variables you have listed.

10.  List the possible ways in which you might find and/or introduce bias within this experiment.

If any of the words within this worksheet are unfamiliar to you, look them up in a statistics text or re-read the statistics notes to be found on our Blackboard site.

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