Lead for Loras Effectiveness

Abby Reinke
Heather Everding
Probability and Statistics
Introduction:
Lead for Loras is a program that each student at Loras has the
opportunity to join while attending classes at the institution. The goal of the
program is to help each student grow as a leader. The four tiers of Lead for
Loras include learning, exploring, applying, and dedication. For this project,
we were given a year, 2008, with various pieces of information about
students that had joined in that given year. After looking at much of the data
given to us about the students that joined Lead for Loras in 2008, the
question began to arise. How does Lead for Loras help students? So based of
of that question, we began to try to answer it by using the data we had. The
questions we decided to investigate were, does Lead for Loras help students
graduate in four year and does Lead for Loras help keep students at Loras?
Since the overall goal of this project was to see if Lead for Loras is helpful, it
was decided that these questions would best answer this question.
Summary of the Data:
In the data we were given, we did most of our test on the first years,
due to the lack of participants in any of the other classes. If there was more
data in each of the classes we had planned on investigating how Lead for
Loras impacted each class and then compare the data. Since there were so
few students in the sophomore, junior, and senior class that joined Lead for
Loras in 2008, it was determined that the small numbers would not be
accurate to use for tests. The data that was used was found on ELearn and
was from the year 2008. This data included all of the students that joined
lead for Loras during the 2007-2008 school year. The data that we were

given was in excel form and was easy to get into R. After that, it became
more complicated. Due to the lack of knowledge on how to use R, trying to
perform the test was a task that ended up involving assistance. On the next
page is a table showing the data for the First Year class of 2007 and how
many semesters it took for them to graduate from Loras. The second to last
row shows the number of First Years of 2007 that did not graduate yet,
transferred, or dropped out of school.

Semesters it Took to Graduate

8
9
10
11
Dropouts/Transfers

Number of Students
18
1
2
1
7

Total Number Of First Years 29

Some information that we looked at was how many credits students
had with respect to their class or grade (i.e. FR, SO, JR, and SR). Below is a
plot of the data.

Credit
s

Year in
School

The table above is most useful when looking at the data for the
freshmen, sophomores, and juniors. We can see that with the, the Freshmen
that join Lead for Loras typically have 18.1 credits completed after their first
semester in college. We could predict from this that the average student in
Lead for Loras does not come in with more than 6 credits This seems like a
fairly typical number and very possible that this value does not vary between
Lead for Loras participants and non-Lead for Loras students. We saw a lot of
variance with the Sophomores and Juniors but there was only a few data
points. Just from looking at the data and the amount of variation from the
mean, we can predict that Lead for Loras does not have students that take
more credits than the average Loras College Student.
Another set of data that we looked at that we found interesting and
worth noting was the type of degree received (Bachelor of Arts-BA or
Bachelor of Science-BS) and high school GPA. Below is the plot of our data.

The left side show you the type of degree, the bottom show the H.S.
GPA, and the right tells you how many students had that type of degree with

the corresponding GPA. We noticed that the students who had higher than a
3.49 GPA received Bachelor of Science degrees. All of the Bachelor of Arts
students had a 3.49 or lower. We also noted that only seven students in Lead
for Loras in 2008 were Bachelor of Science Degrees, the rest were BA
degrees. This could potentially be used to say that Lead for Loras is more
helpful for students planning on earning a Bachelor or Arts degree.

Hypothesis Test:
The object of hypothesis testing is to create a null hypothesis, or a
statement that you believe is true, and then using the data decide whether
two diferent categories are independent. For our information we had two
hypothesis tests. The null hypothesis and alternate hypothesis are as follows:
Ho: Joining Lead for Loras as a freshmen does NOT affect the amount of
semesters it takes for a student to graduate.
HA: Joining Lead for Loras as a freshmen helps students graduate in a lesser
amount of semesters than the average freshmen that started school at Loras
in the Fall of 2007.
Our objective, in order to deduce that Lead for Loras was working, was
to prove the null hypothesis false. Based on our information, we found that
the number of semesters for an average Loras student that started school as
a First Year in 2007 was 8.604 semesters or about 4.5 years. The numbers of
semesters for the average Lead for Loras Freshmen was 8.55 semesters or
about 4.5 years. Due to the fact that the t value is low(.1934), meaning that
the average number of semesters we have from our data for Lead for Loras
students and the average of all students at Loras are very similar we could
not prove the null hypothesis false. We also looked at our probability that the
null hypothesis would be true (that students not in Lead for Loras would

graduate in the same amount of time as those in Lead for Loras) is very high
(85.8 %), also indicating that there is not a significant diference between the
students in Lead for Loras versus those no in Lead for Loras. On the next
page is a plot that may be helpful for readers who prefer a visual
representation to understand the above information. On the x-axis is the
year of the students, the y-axis to the left is the degree date, and to the right
is the percentage (in a decimal) of students that received their degree on the
given date.

The second test we ran involved comparing the melt rate, meaning we
calculated how many students graduated from Loras, i.e. they did NOT
transfer or drop out. We compared the melt rate of the students in Lead for
Loras versus those not in Lead for Loras. We used a probability test for this
part of our research. Below are the null and alternate hypotheses:
Ho: Joining Lead for Loras as a freshmen does not change the melt rate (does
not improve the retention rate for those students in Lead for Loras).

HA: Joining Lead for Loras as a freshmen helps the retention of students that
are involved in Lead for Loras.
Once again we only looked at the values for the First Year Class of
2007 for our data since thats where the majority of the data points were. We
found that the two percentages were not quite diferent enough to be able to
reject the null hypothesis that the melt rate for students in Lead for Loras
and those not in Lead for Loras were the same. The data came very close to
being significantly diferent and we may be finding an issue due to not
having enough data to make an accurate calculation. The probability that the
melt rates compared were the same was a little over 24%. With the data we
have we cannot reject the null hypothesis.
Due to the inability to reject either of the null hypotheses, we cannot
definitively say that Lead for Loras is helpful in regards to retaining students
and students finishing in four years.
Future Work:
After exploring one year of students that joined Lead for Loras, it was
determined that if more test were to be done, we would look at the first
years in 2008, then the sophomores in 2009, then the juniors in 2010, and
finally the seniors in 2011 to see what impact Lead for Loras had on students
as the joined during diferent years during their experience at Loras. Also in
the future, we would like to look at how GPAs varied from those students
that were in Lead for Loras oppose to their classmates that were not in Lead
for Loras. Not only is it important to see if Lead for Loras helps students while
at Loras, it is also important to see if it helps after graduating. With this in
mind, more future would include looking at job placement of those students
in Lead for Loras and those students that were not. All of these future work
questions would have been possible if the data was available at the time of
testing.