IPS - Day 43

Today we undertook another investigation from Activities and Projects for Introductory Statistics Courses, by Millard and Turner. This investigation is entitled "What's in a Name?" In this investigation, students look up the ranking of their name by their birth year and birth decade. They are then asked to make a graphical display of the ranking distribution and answer questions about name popularity between gender and current popularity of names versus popularity during their birth year.

This is an engaging activity as students are interested to see how popular or unusual their names are. This also provides a valuable lesson in data clean-up and integrity. As we completed gathering and sharing results for the class, some students realized they had not used the correct year or decade. We spent several minutes to ensure that the data was correct.

I used this as an opportunity to discuss the importance of cleaning up data. The last thing you want to do is spend a large amount of time performing analyses on data only to find the data is wrong.

After this we briefly discussed what graphs would be appropriate to display the ranking distribution. Several inappropriate graphs were mentioned, such as pie graphs, scatter plots, and bar graphs. The class came up with histograms, box plots, and stem and leaf plots as being appropriate graphs.

I asked students to complete this work at home and we will discuss their responses tomorrow.

I had several groups turn in their preliminary analysis reports for their car data analysis. By and large these papers were incomplete. There were few or no graphs, their descriptions of processes and methodologies were missing, and there wasn't any attempt drawing a conclusion based upon the statistical analysis that was proscribed.

We will spend more time looking at the requirements for a quality statistical analysis report. This was the first attempt and I expect students to get better as we continue to review requirements and develop skills.

As a snow day was just announced for tomorrow, we will have to wait until Wednesday to discuss the responses to the name analysis.

Visit the class summary for a student's perspective and to view the lesson slide.