Assessment Item 3: Statistical Data Collection and Interpretation
Objective:
This assessment task requires you to collect, analyse and interpret data with appropriate discussion and interpretation.
A brief description of the task:
Whilst completing this assessment task, you will identify appropriate methods of data collection relevant to your topic. You will subsequently perform the data collection and apply both qualitative and quantitative statistical analyses to draw insightful conclusions from the data. As part of this work, you are required to also identify potential sources of error in the collected data, e.g. instrumentation errors. You will also need to discuss the quality and quantity of the data that you have obtained as it relates to the topic under investigation. You will also demonstrate the use and interpretation of one- and two-dimensional statistical analysis techniques through the analysis of the collected research related datasets. Part of your work will need to include a statistical validation check and you will need to comment on the reliability and limitations using established engineering techniques. Finally, you are to also consider how to add to or improve the quality of the data to sourced – i.e. identify the sort or type of data that you will would collect and how you would go about obtaining it.
Statistics is used, here, to find a pattern within the data. Present your data and findings in the most meaningful way so that it is interesting to a professional audience. Keep in mind that this is a literature unit, as such your work will require a literature introduction and a discussion supported by literature.
Your submitted report will be marked according to the marking rubric associated with this assessment. Assessment Item 3 is worth 20% of the total assessment for this unit.
What you need to do:
You are required to submit an individual technical report which demonstrates your ability to collect and perform statistical analysis on data. Your report will contain original supporting graphs, tables with an insightful interpretation of the data, findings, recommendations and conclusions. There is no word limit; however, you should be concise. As a guide, a quality report is likely to be between 15 and 20 pages in length.
Assessment requirements:
• This assignment is to be undertaken individually.
• Make sure that any analysis you present is your own work and not simply a summary of what is presented in the source or reference materials.
• Be critical in your identification and analysis of information.
• Justify the use of the sample data and the parameters under investigation.
• Show all of the calculations (but be careful not to break from the technical report format).
• Ensure that your report is informative and concise.
• Use a basic and common font (i.e. Arial or Times New Roman).
• Use an appropriate font size (10 or 12 pt).
• Your submission must have quality references.
• All references must be relevant to the topic.
• Your submission should be in a simple text-based format, with an appropriate layout consisting of sections (with section headings). For example, your section headings may be something like the following:
1. Introduction
2. Parameters and the sample population
3. Collected data
4. Descriptive statistics
5. Correlation
6. Results discussion
7. Conclusions
Note: you do not have to use these headings, they are meant to be an example only