To collect data, we intend to use several different methods.  With the use of
several different methods we will further are able to draw a more accurate
conclusion to our hypothesis because we will have more data.  This data
should give us more detail and allow us to cross-reference that detail in order
to determine whether a correlation does exist between a student's academic
performance and that student's family structure.  The four methods of study we are going to use are interviewing, an IQ test, a questionnaire, and finally a task experiment that we will be able to observe and score.

The first study we intend to use is an interview with both the students and the
teachers.  By interviewing the teachers, we are hoping to get a better
understanding of what kind of students we are dealing with.  Since we are
trying to prove that students coming from a single parent home are better
academically, it is a must to understand as much as we can about a student in
the classroom.  The teachers will give us details about a student's academic
role that the student may not give us and vice versa.  Perhaps the student seems to excel in the classroom, but does poorly on tests.  Therefore, interviewing
teachers will give us another insight into the student's academic performance.

The second sets of interviews we intend to do are on the students themselves.
We are not only hoping to gain a knowledge of how they are performing
academically, but more importantly we are hoping to get a gauge on how their parents influence them in school.  We want to know the parent's role in either
their son's or daughter's academics according to the students themselves.  In
our interviews with both the teacher and the students, we will have basic
questions that we hope will encourage our participants to speak freely.  The
interviews will be done on a one-on-one basis with the participants knowing
the full intent of our study.  The questions we ask will always be the same to
make sure that the participant's answers are not biased, as best we can.  Even
though we will allow participants to speak freely, we do intend to have them
answer our questions along the way.

The second study we will do will be a test.  The test will be a basic IQ test
with the intent of getting a better understanding of a student's academic
ability.  We will administer the same test to all of the participants.  This will
be done one at a time with only the participant taking the test present and the
administrator present, so students don't influence each other
around them during the test.  However, we are quite aware that such a test may not be regarded as the most accurate measure of intelligence.  Our intent is to
use the test as merely supporting data and not the most crucial piece of data in
determining academic ability.  The test will however be a fair way for us to
compare results among participants.  Since the test will be the same for every
participant, thus high reliability, it will be simple to determine who scored
better on the test.  On the other hand, we are ignoring some factors that could
alter test scores;  such as, whether a student has taken an IQ test before.  It
would be easy to understand that such a student could score better on the test a second time through, however these are factors that we have no control over
and will be a non factor in our study.

Thirdly, we intend to have students fill out a questionnaire.  The same
questionnaire will be given to all 60 students from each school.  Once again,
we will do the questionnaires on a one-on-one basis with the students.  We
will make sure that the students understand the directions, and then we will
leave the room so that the students will be more comfortable and hopefully
answer the questions without feeling intimidated by us.  Our intent with the
questionnaire is to learn a student's feeling toward academics and how their
parents influence those feelings.  These feelings are crucial because they will
tell us whether the participant wants to do well in school and whether the
parent(s) of that participant encourage their son or daughter to do well.  If a
student does not want to do well in school it will have an effect on his or her
performance.  That could ultimately create a spurious relationship between our original dependent and independent variables, an error we want to avoid at all costs.  It is a must that we understand that there are many variables that
influence a student's academic performance.  We have already identified
family structure as a variable, however it would be stupid for us to think that
all of the participants in our study are affected by their family structure when
it comes to school.  We cannot be completely sure of the validity of our
hypothesis unless we take into account all factors and variables.  The survey
will also give us the background of the student.  Understanding the family
structure of the student is crucial and although we will provide four categories
from which the student will choose, we will only be concerned with the two:
single parent, or two parents.

Finally, we will conduct a task experiment that we can observe and score.  In
this experiment we will use six groups that consist of ten subjects each, which
we will assign a letter beginning with "A."  Groups A and B will consist of ten students each, who come from a single parent household.  Groups C and D
will consist of ten students each who lives in a two parent household.  Groups
E and F will each have five students who live in a single parent household and
five students who live in a two parent household, for a total of ten students in
each group.  The six groups, consisting of 60 people, will then be set up in one classroom at the same time.  Groups A, C, and E will compete in one game.
Groups B, D, and F will play against each other in a separate game.  The
administrator will then explain that each group is a team and will be
competing against each other in the board game of Trivial Pursuit Junior
Edition.  The board games will be set up in the middle of the room with a
clear view for everyone.  The administrator will explain the board game rules
as the board game determines them, reading straight from the games rule
book.  The administrator will read all questions and make sure that the games
are played correctly and will record which team has one the game.
Throughout this game we will observe the students without the students
knowing that we are observing them.  Hopefully this experiment should yield
some useful information as to who can perform better in the game.  Since the
game is specifically designed to calculate and award the smarter players, we
too can use this gauge in determining which group of students are the smarter
players.

The aforementioned methods, if done correctly, should yield results that
support or reject our hypothesis.  These studies may not be the best or the only way to measure a student's academic abilities, but they are adequate enough
for our studies.  We know that there are many factors that determine a
student's academic performance; we chose these studies because we felt that
they contained a high number of those factors.  The fact is that these studies
will give us results to compare and analyze.