IA help?

[AlexZettler]

Okay, so my IA is due next week. Literally my teacher just left us by ourselves to do it. He took us to the computer lab for 2 days, but everytime I asked for help he kinda told me, but not well enough for me to understand it. So basically I'm doing "Does the day it was released have an effect on the number it reached on the Billboard chart?" meaning Taylor Swift songs. I already have the data and everything. My only problem is I don't know what tests to use to test it. He told me it was a hard topic, but he wouldn't let me change it to a survey either.. So I'm stuck trying to decide what math to do.

[MollyDewhirst]

I understand completely, my Chemistry teacher has done the same thing for all of our IAs!

I'm maths studies too, and I did 'Does literacy rate affect number of malaria cases in a country', because my entire class was doing stuff with national statistics as it was really easy to find the data.

I don't actually know if this is any use, because it is a pretty different research question, but I did the following:

--> Scatter diagram (not sure how this would work with dates of release - maybe do something like 'days before chart announced it was released', so in the UK because charts are done on Sunday, Monday would be 6 days, Tuesday 5 days etc )

--> I found the mean for everything, just seemed a sensible thing to do

--> I did a regression line (line of best fit but calculated) for the scatter diagram

--> The standard deviation for each data set as well

--> I did the Product-Moment Correlation Coefficient as well, which I'm pretty sure you should have been taught, but if there'll be a help page somewhere online

--> i also did the Chi Squared test for independence, (hoping it would prove dependence) which is definitely on the Studies course so your textbook will tell you how to do it, it took me forever to work out how!

Don't know how much use any of that is to you, but its pretty much all that I did and then I concluded it all and went on about problems with validity and reliability and stuff - just the usual IB waffle that doesn't mean much, but uses key words so you get the points.

The biggest bit of advice I have is get a copy of the markscheme / criteria - there's a PDF 'guide to Maths Studies SL' somewhere online and its right at the end of that, and just make sure you are hitting all of the key points so they have to give you marks.

Hope some of this was useful!!