Stats Class Proves Shuttle Run Effective

For most high school student’s gym is a safe haven, a recreational period breaking up a day filled with rigorous AP and honor level core courses.  However, after a recent change to the New Jersey curriculum for physical education classes in public high schools, students now find themselves dreading the bell signaling gym.

With the increasingly problematic issue of childhood and teenage obesity state legislatures around the country have looked to schools to combat the problem.  This past year New Jersey passed a piece of legislation making it mandatory for public high schools to issue the nationwide physical fitness test to students four times during a school year.  Previously students only needed to perform the test twice.  This means fewer games of kickball and more demanding exercises.

This change in curriculum is meant to focus more on student’s personal improvement opposed to the old system focusing on whether a student passes or fails based on a countrywide standard.  There are five components of the physical fitness test: pushups, sit ups, pull ups, long jump, and shuttle run.  Students are expected to improve their scores on each individual test from their first trial to their second and their third to their fourth.

A recent study conducted by three AP statistic students of Mr. Cashill’s class have concluded through statistical analysis that improvement is evident for the shuttle run portion of the test for Verona High School students.  The shuttle run is a 300 yard sprint to measure speed and agility.  To determine if there was a significant improvement in VHS student’s shuttle run times from trial one to trial two the students conducted a statistical significance test.

A significance test in statistics is a test which analyzes whether or not data supports or rejects a particular hypothesis.  In this instance the null hypothesis being tested is that there is no difference between the times from the two trials of the shuttle run.  The alternate hypothesis is that the time from the second trial was less, thus showing improvement.

To perform this test the three students collected the times from each student’s first and second shuttle run.  This information was obtained from VHS gym teachers.  They then used this data to find the average time it took students to complete the first trial of the shuttle run and then the second trial.  After conducting the significance test the students were able to conclude that there was a statistically significant decrease from trial one to trial two. Therefore the students were able to reject the null hypothesis. This proves that a significant improvement took place and that the physical education department at VHS is doing its job.