The Red Book Project

The Red Book Project was a simple, but insightful investigation, allowing students to apply statistics, organizing and summarizing data and then drawing conclusions based on the data. An investigation focuses on a well-defined collection of objects constituting a population of interest. In this study, the students were investigating the number of red books that were in the Walsh Library at Seton Hall University in about fifteen minutes. My group approached this by each member taking a floor at the library, counting how many red books are on a shelf, then multiplying the amount of books by the number of shelves on the floor, and lastly the total books on each floor from each member were added together for a final record of the amount of red

Unfortunately, I do not think our estimate is very accurate, because the data was not properly collected, as the technique used to collect the data was lacking in efficiency and there were many constraints overall. For example, time was limited, therefore counting all the red books on each shelf was impractical, therefore a sample, a subset of the total red books on each shelf multiplied by the amount of shelves had to be recorded. However, there was not the same amount of red books one each shelf, therefore the sample was not representative of the total population, leading to error. In addition, the color red was not defined in the experiment. There were many shades of red, therefore, some books that I considered that wasn’t red could have been actually red. Moreover, some books were red on the spine of the book, but not the whole book, therefore, I was unsure if those books were to be included with the total amount of books recorded. If there was more time, I would still use techniques in inferential statistics, generalizing from a sample to a population. Yet, I would choose the simple random method, as this ensures a representative sample is taken. I would sample from all the shelves with the same amount of books, as the amount of red books on these shelves would be more representative of the total red books at the library. Also, if unlimited time is given, counting all the red books on each shelf is ideal, than estimating and generalizing from the sample to the population. All in all, the Red Book Project was a good way to learn about statistics, specifically about population, samples, and techniques for collecting