Teen Motor Vehicle Crashes Summary

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Critique of a Scientific Investigation The article “Adolescent Sleep, School Start Times, and Teen Motor Vehicle Crashes” is presented by Dr. Fred Danner and Dr. Barbara Phillips in the Journal of Clinical Sleep and Medicine to convince the reader that early school start times across the country are affecting the ability of high school students to function properly, specifically while driving. The argument is presented through a study conducted over a two-year period in a single school district. The first year of the study had early school start times of 7:30 and 8:00 AM and the second had the altered late start time of 8:30 and 9:00 AM. During these two years, middle and high school students were polled on their sleeping habits. The data …show more content…

This is significant because graphs, or any visual representation of data, can quickly show a lot of data in a single picture that is easily analyzed by the reader. Danner and Phillips primarily utilize bar graphs to compare the amount of sleep students in grades nine through twelve got before the school start time change and after. Using the same type of graph to connect the ideas visually, the authors present the data of car crashes of teen drivers in the county and state from before and after the school start time change. Both sets of graphs work together to strengthen the argument and clarify the data to the reader that when students get more sleep, there are less car crashes involving teen …show more content…

They quickly made the assumption that every county would have the same results as the single county school district that they studied. They did not have nearly a large enough group to claim that the results would be the same across the country. They also lacked a control group, one they would study over the course of the same few years without changing the school start time. Controls are very important in any scientific study to show that the changed variable really is having an effect on the experimental group, and that some outside variable is not the cause of the change. Because they failed to use a control group, they are not able to conclude that changing school start times is what had an effect on the decrease in crashes in the county. They came to the conclusion too quickly, which made their argument lose some of its logical

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