Statistics students apply math to their world

Senior Liberty Cordell, for her statistics class, took the effort to analyze her own sleep disorder called obstructive sleep apnea. Throughout a yearlong project, she tracked how long she slept and measured how rested she felt throughout the day.

“According to my doctors, I stop breathing about 26 times an hour [when I sleep], anywhere from three to 15 seconds,” Cordell said. “This is really important to me so I can better understand this condition and myself.”

In a linear regression graph, she concluded sleep hours and sleep quality have no correlation with each other. Cordell then measured, through a probability distribution, the chances she would sleep more than nine hours on any given night.

“I wanted to see, on [any] given day, if I would sleep over nine hours, and that was about 35.9% out of 30 days,” Cordell said. “In conclusion, I found that no matter how much sleep I get, I’m not going to feel well rested at all.”

Cordell is just one of many statistics students who collected data on their sleep and exercise, counted products sold at their part-time jobs or tracked the amount of time they spent on social media.

With months of data in their notes, Creston’s statistics students have been working hard for a class that counted toward their high school education and for college credit.

These students’ yearlong projects were presented to the public Friday in the high school’s gym, where they gave presentations on their findings and process, from the hypothesis to their conclusions.

Each student prepared a poster with key graphs and observations, detailing the work they did throughout the year. They answered questions from fellow students, faculty, family and others who came to visit.

Through histograms, box plots, binomial distribution, probability distribution and more, students showed, through data and statistics they collected themselves, findings and conclusions they drew on their own.

Ellie Soosloff, a Creston High School upper-level math teacher, said the project originated from a research experience for teachers at Iowa State University last summer, reintroducing the project for the classroom.

“At the beginning of this semester, I told them all to pick a topic that was really important to them or to society,” Soosloff said. “We’ve essentially been learning all of our topics through the lens of their data. So with every new unit we’ve done, I’ve introduced a new small portion of the rubric where they’ve had to do different things with their data.”

Students choose their own subject to collect data from. Oftentimes, these end up being personally connected to the students, which helped motivate their projects. Soosloff said this allowed for the students to be more creative and invested in their studies.

“That was really the idea behind letting them choose whatever they wanted to investigate rather than forcing them down a road of just making these types of graphs and doing hypothesis testing and confidence intervals with topics that may not mean that much to them,” Soosloff said. “This way, there’s more of a connection between the math that we’re doing and the real world.”

Senior Hollynn Rieck chose her family’s business, Champion Steaks, as her subject of research. She analyzed five cuts of meat to see which cut was the most valuable to her parents’ company by looking at sales during the month of December.

“I had a question of if 10 people were to come in, how many of them would actually buy steaks?” Rieck explained. “So, through my binomial distribution, I learned that four to five people would actually, out of a group of 10, would come in and buy a steak.”

Another senior, Jaycee Hanson, measured the amount of teas sold in March at another family business, Hanson Nutrition. Every “Thirsty Thursday,” the business stocks a new tea.

Hanson measured when patrons were buying their teas, including that those who arrive on Thursday are 92% more likely to also arrive on Friday. This informed when Hanson should work and when the store should stock product.

“[It’s] making them addicted,” Hanson joked. “What I found was that I’d either want to work on a Thursday or Friday. My mom should probably order product on a Monday or Tuesday, so it comes in on time and that during the week she should have two to three people work per shift and on the weekends only about one person.”

Many students focused on analyzing their personal health, whether from exercise or from sleep quality. Others focused on analyzing environmental trends, something increasingly prominent in the world they’ll soon be inheriting.

Junior Kaylie Phelps measured black carbon levels during the COVID-19 pandemic, analyzing if the period of dormancy affected the environment in significant ways. Senior Malachi Webber tracked the number of severe storms based on their damages to see if the number has been increasing since 1995.

Other projects included senior Ella Turner measuring the crime rates by county in Iowa’s District 5; sophomore Olivia Christensen’s analysis of sea surface temperatures between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans; senior Kadley Bailey measuring her improvement at basketball by tracking her points scored from freshman to senior year and senior Nate Carroll polling students and Creston faculty on who the GOAT of basketball is: LeBron James or Michael Jordon?

The statistics course is a dual-credit class which shares high school credits with college credits from Southwestern Community College. This upper level class challenges students to start applying what they learn in school to beyond the classroom, bridging the gap between education and their next steps.

These courses, called SWCC Concurrent Enrollment Program courses, are offered at the high school. Besides statistics, other math courses in the CEP program include college algebra and calculus I. Other courses outside of math include fundamentals of oral communication and introduction to psychology.

“Having the ability for kids to be able to push themselves to different levels and to be able to explore different fields that they might be interested in, even if they’re not sure, I think is so important,” Soosloff said. “Just the ability for them to branch out, to have the opportunity to learn things above what the normal high school curriculum could offer, I think has really let these kids kind of open up their minds beyond what they would have been able to do otherwise.”