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8. Demography Project:
Conducting data analysis using online data banks
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- Find and display data relevant to a given situation
- Read, interpret, and summarize graphs and data sets
- Communicate ideas effectively using statistics, graphs, and charts
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Overview
In the Demography Project, students use online data banks to collect and analyze data about regional demographics. They explore topics like regional population, wealth, education, and age distribution using the U.S. Census Bureau's American FactFinder website (Figure 1) and then search for additional sources of data on the World Wide Web. Once they have located the data they need, they download it to a computer and use it to generate statistics such as averages and ranges and create customized graphs and charts for their final report.
The Value of This Technology
Online data banks offer an abundance of data sets that can be downloaded to spreadsheets and used to help students learn to analyze complex data and present meaningful summaries of the data. Information from "real life" resources keeps data authentic and current and presents data sets that can pique the interest of almost any student. Real sets of data, because they are not "cleaned up" for the textbook (e. g. rounding numbers for convenience), also challenge students' data analysis skills and give students experience with both good representations of data (effective, clear, easy to understand) and poor representations of data (confusing, unclear, difficult to understand).
Look in the Classroom
Ms. Drouet's students have had a difficult time interpreting tables of data and creating their own graphs and tables....
More...
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