A Student T-Test was performed on the data from the StarLogo programs.The Student T-Test was used to check the statistical significance of the data. This test tells whether the difference between the before and after numbers is genuine or whether this difference could merely have been the result of chance. Overall, a T-Test compares two means and determines within a specified degree of certainty whether the two means really are different, or whether the difference might have occurred by chance. An unpaired two sample, two tailed T-Test was calculated using Microsoft Excel. The probability for the number of dropouts for the bystander versus the frally was 9% which is greater than the 5% value in the region of uncertainity, the data can be stated to be outside of the 95% confidence level of certainty. This means that the data is not statistically significant. The same T-Test was performed on the number of dropouts for the bystander versus the frally with a force field. The probability for this test was 0.0005%, which is less than the 5% value in the region of uncertainty. This means that there is a 99.0005% chance that there is a difference in the number of dropouts between the Bystander Model versus the Frally with a Force Field Model.
What this means is that there is no statistical difference in the number of dropouts in school when there are people present that positively affect the attitude of students (the Frally Model). But when there exists a person that actively interferes and stops bullying, in addition to positively influencing people’s attitudes, there is a statistically significant decrease in the number of students that drop out.
What we learned from our model and research is that schools and adults tend to focus too much on the negative. Everybody knows that being a bully is bad, that we should not bully, but we want to focus on the positive and do the opposite by saying, “Be a frally!” If other people are frallies we could not only help the person being bullied but we could also help the bully. We believe that this could make a difference in how many dropouts there are, and our model has shown us that this is true. There would be fewer dropouts if there was at least one frally in every school.
We found that overall, the frally made a huge difference, and the force field helped even more. According to our model, to have a healthy school environment, there has to be between 5 and 8 frallies for the number of students in our model. We also learned that there only needs to be one person to start to make a difference and be a frally because if there is at least one frally it will make other people join in on the kindness.