Thanks for this. I had been trying to decide what to do with my stats project next year, this will help. I do things a little differently, but I don’t know if you would like it.

Data Collection takes one day. I give every kid a packet with 8 sets of 3 questions (qualitative, discrete, and continuous data), and every kid answers them all in one class period. I trade buy-in (kids not choosing what to track) for access (everyone submits data and gets a pile of data to work on). And as math projects go, buy-in isn’t bad. They like to see how they compare to their classmates.

Overnight I take both classes’ data and chop the 8 sets of questions up with a paper cutter. In class, they get in groups of three or four, and each group gets a data set – everyone’s responses to 3 questions.

I limit their options for what types of graphs they can choose (histogram, box&whisker, circle graph, scatter plot) to align with what the NY standards expect, but they make the decisions about which types of graphs to apply to their three questions. I give the option of using computers or creating a poster. I give each group a big packet of Excel instructions for each type of graph. This cuts down on my having to run around to groups like a crazy chicken. They also have to calculate measures of central tendency for their numerical data and answer-in-complete-sentences a few analysis questions for each.

All this group work takes around 5 class meetings (I have 43-minute periods, not blocks). The biggest challenge I have is helping them organize and tabulate their data so they can work with it easily. They are assessed by giving a presentation to their class and invited dignitaries and graded with a rubric. The computer work makes this nice, we just throw their stuff up with the projector. The posters are more awkward.

I like this project, but I’m not happy with their retention of certain details yet. Later today I will post my related documents at f(t) if anyone is interested. Right now I have to take my visiting mom for breakfast and enjoy the last non-work day of summer!

Still slogging my way through the Rhee post (and I’m old, but just getting certified, and…well…I’m more like the old’uns than the young’uns on this one. A decade or two of life experience and seeing the politics of situations that shouldn’t have them and one develops a fondness for health benefits and places wherein bad people can be removed…but that ALSO protect the good and best people.)

Quick thoughts here:

Shorter data collection, especially since it’s four things. Either cut the number in half (one individual, one for the whole class) or cut the time to a month.

Data set(s) to provide to those who drop out. Enables/requires them to complete the task.

Did you keep track of the excel problems? As mentioned above, develop written (or websited) procedures to hand out in an FAQ sort of format.

I think your immigrant to native ratio is right on. Kids’ computer skills are *not* that great. I agree that you did them a big favor pushing them through this (sounds like play-doh extrusion when I say it like that).

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I heartily agree on the wasted time.

However, my kids are in a district that is going to look at timing elementary curriculum delivery to the minute in a couple of schools this year — 4 minutes on pre-story vocabulary, x minutes reading story, z minutes answering y questions. I fear for the ability to tailor anything, to do anything that’s useful and educational, and fit it into wasted moments (or hours provided by not having wasted moments).

We already have every 6 days testing (even in Kindergarten, where flipping the pages correctly is harder than the test itself and where the term “playscape” was used about a playground. Way to reach the 5 year olds, wondering where the heck that might be when all they could see was a playground. :-p ) It’s fine for assessing what happened in the previous 5 days (though many teachers could give you the results from their observations of the kids and their work). However, the next assessed unit begins immediately. If you find out your kids need more work…well, too damn bad! Try to fit it in the cracks and definitely make sure they don’t screw up on the next test.

I’ll be student teaching this starting…really soon! Then I’ll really know if there’s lots of wasted time or any time for enrichment at all.

FWIW, Scott McLeod (aka @mcleod) has done the EXCEL screencasts for us all already.

http://www.schooldatatutorials.org/

They’re teacher/leader-based, and they’re not from EXCEL 2007, but they work the same…

Here’s my stuff.

The one detail in this kind of data presentation that I obsess most about is the units used for expressing the data. Good units can have a similar effect to the visual design, like nice colors even grids.

For example, saying you at 800 pieces of gum over the course of the project sounds much different than saying you ate 5 pieces of gum per day during the project. They convey different things. Often times absolute units (800 pieces of gum) confuse me because it makes everything seem huge, whereas normalized units are often easier to visualize (5 pieces of gum per day).

A similar comparison can be made for electric power units: A 100 Watt light bulb uses 3.2 GJ in one year. 3.2 GJ sounds like a lot, and I don’t really have an intuitive grasp for it. 100 Watts is equivalent and makes more sense to me.

Dan,
Things to think about:
1. Start smaller to teach the Excel skills (like sorting M&Ms out of a package) to make sure everybody has the same skill set.
2. Could they have had the option to work in pairs? Or could each freshman pair be in charge of only one data set? and them compile into a group project. Older kids could do “4 slide project”
3. To get the data could different pairs bring different data to the group, ie somebody do food, some text messaging, some TV watching, some Facebooking, or whatever— ( like Jen suggested)
4. Could you have a graphic designer come in and talk about the design elements?
5. Open a ning or Moodle to storing all student work (after discussing file naming)!!
6. Offer to do something with his/her students while the business apps teacher teaches Excel to your kids.
7. Assign an online Excel tutorial as homework, there are tons online.
8. Write a grant for 1:1 computers in your classroom, the math connection would be a huge draw since I would think few people write tech grants with a math focus. Let me know and I’ll send you info on which grants to apply for.

OK< that was fun. N

The 2 things I never got with the Feltron project were taste and time.

The design (Feltron’s) didn’t do it for me. It wasn’t that I hated it, and I could see it was accomplished, but I burrowed down into it and it never resolved into anything for me. Just stayed as graphs and grids and numbers in different colours – not to my taste. I would never have been able to digest this as a child.

Time/effort is obvious – 4 variables per day for 10 weeks is a pretty heavy obligation, and it would have sparked some emotional baggage/resistance in me because I would have taken it as “what I did on my holidays” to the power N – and I never accepted having to document myself on demand.

I can see why you’re going with it, and the Excel experience is surely useful but I really doubt that you can refine it to get over the 2 points above: trying to inculcate a design sensibility + forcing self documentation + teaching math, is too much.

I haven’t read the comments, so please forgive me if I am repeating something that someone else said.

Aside from screencasts to cover important excel concepts, also consider assigning the strong students to the weak students to help them out. Only don’t make it sound like “assigning”.

Try using Google documents. They have a spreadsheet. Save automatically. Are hosted on the web. Cannot be killed by computer arsenic file names. And create graphs and charts. Oh, and did I mention that they are free? docs.google.com

When doing this, have students generate a hypothesis. This is the science teacher in me speaking. But I find that when students are asked to deal in data, it helps to give them a “so why am I wading through this data”. Here’s how I would do it:

Give each student an envelope. Have them write down their predictions on different variables. Example: “I believe that I spend more time studying than watching TV.”

Put those predictions inside the envelope. Store it in the classroom. Tell students that you are going to check back at the end to see how many really know themselves.

I like the idea of keeping data every day for an entire month. That give 30 (or perhaps 31) days of data (provided it is not February) on four different data points. That’s a lot of data for high schoolers. Heck, that’s a lot of data for college kids, too. If they master this, then they can move upward and onward.

Not knowing your student’s home computer/internet situation, I’d make an offer to have the students go ahead and record the data right into their spreadsheet of choice. Then the ones who come in on data!entry day 1 and claim to be, “All done,” can easily be reassigned the role of spreadsheet expert and sent forth to enlighten their fellow classmates.

I’d also add an analysis piece. First I’d have them compare their actual results to their earlier predictions. Then I’d have them try to come up with some reasons why the two didn’t match. Why, for example, was their TV time higher than their studying time? Why did they feel otherwise? Where is that disconnect coming from. And how does it relate to their grades in school?

I think this is a great assignment, and certainly did better than expected giving that it was the first year you were trying it out. The question to ask when doing it again is how to make it more authentic; how to turn this assignment in to answering a question the students really want to buy in to answer. It appears that you love simple visual representations of data, but these students are young yet and won’t do it for such an abstract concept. Give them something more concrete.

P.P.S. Kudos on the interview too. Love that stuff.

I know I am getting late into the discussion but a few comments (or obvious observations) I would like to agree with that Dan said.

#1) students computer skills not as high as we think they are. Kids can text message and use cell phones and ipods, but skills like saving files and changing directories and Excel aren’t obvious. When I started teaching I thought what Dan thought (that these are things that the kids will know coming into your class), but I still have to go through them year after year.

#2) 45% handing it in: one of the potential difficulties with this project is the fact that students have to track their activities for two months to get the data. I realize the purpose was to give the students ownership over their work and to make them feel that this was their project (as undoubtedly took place for those that submitted it), but tracking your daily life is not as easy thing.

#3) You took a risk and it didn’t work out as much as you wanted to. You know what Dan, most people wouldn’t be able (or confident enough or whatever) to take a month risk on a project. Since you truly believed in it, I know that you will have done lots of reflections on how to improve it next time (if there is a next time as you say).

As usual, your blog inspires (even when things don’t go your way)

Dan,
Which class did you do this in? It seems like more than one class would be too much, but fortunately, you don’t know those words.

I was thinking this could possibly an appropriate end of the year assignment/project.

How did you make the graphs for days out of the month that you blogged? Are those from Excel?