[Poster Winner]

Northeast Ohio Science and Engineering Fair

1997 Statistical Special Award Winners




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Certificates of Award
The first prize went to Kevin Ostanek from Madison High School in the Biology 11-12 category for his project entitled “Gray tree frog research project.” This study examined two species of gray tree frogs that look alike. When blood cell length and width were examined there was very good discrimination between the two species. A Mann-Whitney Test was used to compare the distribu-tions of the two species. It was highly significant. A cutpoint was chosen to classify future frogs into the two species. There were only about 5 percent of the observations that overlapped in the two distributions. Kevin received $75 cash, Tanur's book and a Cer-tificate of Award. Cohn's book was awarded to advisor Tim Matson at The Natural History Museum.

Cortrell Kinney from John Hay High School in Cleveland was awarded a Certificate of Award, a $50 cash award and Tanur's book for his project “Do estrogen and gibberellic acid affect plant growth?” His entry was also in the Biology 11-12 category. A Cohn book was awarded to his teacher, Mr. Jeffries. Cortrell's study compared the growth of plants given one of three treatments: control (no treatment), estrogen, and gibberellic acid. Plots were made of the plant height over time and the distance between major leaf nodes with means and standard deviations shown. This was one of the few projects recognizing variability. One group showed much more growth and the standard deviations did not overlap with those in the lower groups (gibberellic acid). The two lower groups (including the control) had much overlap in the standard deviations. Therefore, it was concluded that the gibberellic acid group did significantly better and the two lower groups were similar.

Jessica Blanton of Shaker Heights Middle School was also awarded a Certificate of Award, $50 cash award, and Tanur's book for her Biology 7-8 entry “The effects of detergent on DNA transfer to bacteria.” Jessica compared the effectiveness of DNA transfer in bacteria in each of four groups by measuring the number of bacteria colonies formed to what was the expected level in a control group. She used a Student's t-test for each comparison and foundsignificance. She also showed the standard deviation of each group along with the mean. Cohn’s book was awarded to the teacher Ms. Loughler.

Certificates of Merit were also awarded to three other students:
  • “Achievement tests - the effects of ethnicity and environment,” Gabriel Ling, Mayfield High School, BHS 9-10 Gabriels's entry compared SAT scores in 5 students of Asian ethnicity to 5 students of European ethnicity. He found higher mean scores in the Asian group. Also, he correlated a score of amount of pressure parents apply to students and the level of importance the students felt their parents placed on school to the SAT scores of both groups combined and found very low correlations and was able to interpret them properly.
  • "Which size bouncy ball bounces highest?" Amy Summers, Lakewood Junior High School, PMA 7-8. Amy's entry had three balls of each of three sizes. Each size group's balls were of similar composition (but the compositions of the different sizes were different). She recorded the height each ball bounced after being dropped from the top of a refrigerator and compared the three size groups using the mean, median, mode and range of heights within each group.
  • "The speed of sound: constant? I think not,” Jonathan Khoury, Mayfield High School, Math 9-10. Jonathan's Physics and entry Jonathan measured the speed of sound by the time it takes to hear a board being hit with a hammer and seeing it being hit from a distance. Four values were recorded on each of four days where the outside temperature was differ-ent. Observations were done in Chagrin Valley Recreation area and excluded one observation as an outlier due to being more than 1.5 times the interquartile range. He showed that the observed relation of distance and time did not follow the expected quadratic relationship, probably due to experimental error in recording the measurements accurately (for example, precisely starting the stop watch when the board was hit with the hammer).

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