STA 221 - Spring 2025 – Project: Research Topics

Goals

Team icebreaker
Hypothesis testing practice
Final project - research topics

Icebreaker

Get into your lab teams.
Choose a reporter
- Need help choosing? Person with birthday closest to today’s date.
Identify 8 things everyone in the group has in common (~ 5 minutes)
- Not being a Duke student
- Not clothes (e.g., we’re all wearing socks)
- Not body parts (e.g., we all have a nose)
Reporter will share list with the class.

Hypothesis testing

Below is the model using student enrollment (in thousands) and institution type to predict an institution’s football expenditures (in millions). Click here for more details about the data.

term	estimate	std.error	statistic
(Intercept)	19.332	2.984	6.478
enrollment_th	0.780	0.110	7.074
typePublic	-13.226	3.153	-4.195

Explain what each value in the row for typePublic means.
Do the data provide evidence that institution type is a useful predictor in this model?

Final team project

Goal: Use the methods from STA 221 to analyze data and answer a research question developed by your team
Primary deliverables:
1. an in-person presentation about the exploratory data analysis and initial modeling
2. a written, reproducible final report detailing your analysis
3. a summary of your project highlights to share with the class
4. a GitHub repository containing all work from the project
There are periodic project milestones throughout the semester to help you work towards the primary deliverables

Today’s focus: Research topics

Goals: Identify three potential research topics your team is interested in investigating and draft research questions.
You do not need to have a data set at this point
You can discuss the topics you put in the student survey to help generate ideas
Submission: All work for the project will be submitted in your team’s GitHub repo. You will receive feedback via an Issue on GitHub to model a workflow often used in practice.

🔗 https://sta221-sp25.netlify.app/project