Unknowingly, I collected the same data as Spencer this week. My data looked similar but a little different.
Tuesday:
Mean (seconds) : 7.07
Standard Deviation (seconds) : 5.46
Thursday:
Mean : 6.28
Standard Deviation : 4.87
The slight alterations in my data vs Spencer’s could be a result of different timing strategies or different questions timed. To explain this data I hypothesized that the more reading we had assigned, the longer it would take between question and answer. Tuesday’s reading assignment was significantly longer than Thursday’s so I thought there would be a large difference between question and answer times. In reality, the means were fairly similar so my hypothesis was likely false. One explanation could be because we don’t always discuss the readings directly. Often we break off and do group work or use our computers. I found that when we are asked to share what we’ve found on the computer, our time after the question is very small, averaging around 2 seconds. This could be because people are excited to share what they’ve found. To get more specific data it could be helpful to categorize the questions into different groups, like questions about the reading or questions about group work, in order to get a better understanding of the time between question and answer.