URE OMPS Summer 2010 Mathematics Team
Team Members: Dalesha Cartman, Marvin Elder II.
Team Mentor: Dr. Yolanda McMillian.

Key Words: Mean, Median, Mode, skew (positive or negative), normally distributed, bimodal, correlation, standard deviation, degrees of freedom, critical values, margin of errors, confidence intervals, variance, hypothesis (null or alternatives), right-tailed test, left-tailed test, and two-tailed test.

The Undergraduate Research Experience in Ocean, Marine, and Polar Science (URE OMPS) program is set up to promote the professional development of undergraduate students through their participation in ocean, marine and polar science research. Each student was assigned to a specific research team, where they worked closely with the assigned faculty.

An additional component of the program was the opportunity for students to participate in virtual seminars. These seminars allowed the students to become more familiar with topics such as global warming and ice sheets, and it also allowed students to interact with the nation’s most prominent scientists.

The primary focus of the research project was threefold. First, research was conducted on the role of the Institutional Review Board (IRB). During the research of the IRB, mock IRB approval applications were submitted for review. These actions had to be taken before any research could begin.

Second, the focus of the research project was to assess the hypothesized success of both the URE OMPS program and the virtual seminars through a comprehensive data analysis of questionnaire responses using experimental statistics.

Third, the design of experimental questionnaires was explored. Demographic, Likert Scale, open- and closed-ended survey questions were all used for questionnaires that were administered after the virtual seminars. Calculations of the statistical measures were done using the two sample test for observational data using the statistical software packages Excel-StatPlus and Minitab.