Sampling Methods
Good Methods (SRS, cluster, stratified, systematic start)
Bad Method (convenience)
Bias in Sample Surveys
Sample Surveys
Experiments
Create a well designed survey and give it to a random sample of your population of interest. Analyze your results. *Note, the population does not need to be people. It can be the price of things, animals, etc.
Create a biased and unbiased survey and do an experiment to see if you can influence someone's answer.
Create and conduct an experiment to investigate a question of interest.
Do research on effective teacher evaluations, then evaluate the effectiveness of the student feedback survey, find sources of bias, then propose a new and improved one.
Design a lesson to teach to middle school students about data collection. *This could also be recorded and uploaded to YouTube.
Create a podcast on an interesting observational study or experiment.
Repeat a well-known experiment to see if you get similar results.
Fill in the information on this form (one row per group)
For the Google Doc
Change the sharing settings so that everyone with the link can COMMENT
Write a brief outline of how you intend to collect your data. Include lots of details.
To start, have a look at what your classmates are doing. Review three of the proposals and leave comments and suggestions on their project outline.
After reviewing their work, review the comments that were left on your project and make adjustments as needed. Based on the feedback, start the next steps that you outlined for yourself/your group.
Here are some tips if you have chosen to do any of the following for your projects:
Make sure you understand the differences between an observational study and an experiment
Make sure you are gathering your data using a sampling method that will give you statistically representative and unbiased results from your population. You can complete this worksheet to help you select your sample if you are doing an observational study.
If you are creating a survey, you will need to test it out! Post a link to your survey in Class Data spreadsheet and get at least 5 volunteers to take your survey - it is more helpful if when they are taking the survey they are trying to poke holes in it any way they can.
If you are doing an experiment, please do a trial version of your experiment on your classmates to work out all of the kinks you might encounter.
Create your presentation. Use the outline below. This should look similar to all of the previous presentation outlines we have used in class this year.
What are the W's for this research?
Why is this an important question to study?
Was this an observational study or an experiment?
How was random selection used (or in an ideal world, how would you have used it if not in a lockdown - reference that worksheet you completed last class)?
Describe the study/experiment and include graphs/tables/displays of your results
Who/what are the results generalizable to (if anyone/anything)?
Describe any ethical ramifications.
Every data set has bias, no matter how careful we are in the collection of it. Where do you think bias shows up in your dataset?
How could this observational study/experiment been better conducted for future studies?
Please submit a link to the rough draft of your presentation. Please give anyone with the link comment access.
Review two presentations using this grading rubric. Leave comments on your classmates' work.
Review comments on your presentation and make adjustments.