Gathering Data
Students need to know about different types of data, as well what a sample and a population are.
Tasks/Ideas
- Leckie Higher Applications Student Book – Chapter 6 – Exercise 6A
- Types of Data Worksheet- Download Here
- Populations and Samples- Mrs Cao’s Classroom
- A great activity is to have students search online for a dataset that interests them. Answer the following:
- Have them look at each column- what are the data types?
- Is the dataset a sample, if so what was the population?
- If this was a sample, was it a random sample? How do you know?
Bias
Tasks/Ideas
- Leckie Higher Applications Student Book – Chapter 6 – Exercise 6B
- This worksheet has lots of different scenarios to consider, with answers too!
Outliers
Tasks/Ideas
- Leckie Higher Applications Student Book – Chapter 6 – Exercise 6C
- How does removing outliers affect different statistics? – Outliers – Applying Maths
Sourcing Data for the Project
Tasks/Ideas
- Leckie Higher Applications Student Book – Chapter 6 – Project Box
- Here are some useful places for students to look for data:
- Open Intro – Lots of data on lots of topics, all available in a CSV format. Most importantly for students doing their projects, it describes where the data comes from. I couldn’t recommend this website more!
- CORGI Data Sets – The Collection of Really Great, Interesting, Situated Datasets. Nothing to do with dogs, just lots of students-friendly datasets to use and explore.
- A good piece of advice is to search for datasets using the terms “csv” and “beginner” in the search terms. Another piece of advice- if the dataset looks like a mess, it’s not clear whether it’s a sample or a population, and you can’t find any information about where the dataset came from- leave it be and keep searching!
Remember, it makes no sense to complete a hypothesis test on a population. You can only complete a hypothesis test on a sample. As the project requires a hypothesis test to be completed, the dataset must be a sample. Never lose sight of this!