Count yourself in! Teacher's notes

Step one: Creating a survey

The issue of what to include in a survey is very important. When you have discussions with students, be sure to spend time talking about matters like this:

1. What broad categories do you think would help give people a really good picture of your life as a student (e.g., sports, television watching, how people get to school, number of adult teeth that have grown in, eating habits)?
   1. Follow some of the links on the Student task page to see what Statistics Canada counts when they 'paint a picture' of what life is like for Canadians. Talk to students about whether they might want to use some of these categories, or add new ones they think would give a better picture of their actual lives.
   2. Statistics Canada counts many things to give people a picture of what life is like for Canadians over the age of 15.
      • As a final step in the project, students will be able to compare data they have generated with Statistics Canada data about our population in general. There are real benefits to including some of the same categories for purposes of comparison. There are also real benefits to looking at what important categories the students have included that adults might have ignored.
      • Discuss whether they think the picture of life for them will look different from life for adult Canadians.
2. Within each category, you and your students will need to decide what specific questions students should ask people when they start counting. For example, which specific sports do they think they should collect data about? What's the best way of doing that? Can they see any problems when they decide in advance which sports to include in their survey, and which ones to leave out? Can they see any problems if they just leave a blank under the word Sports and let people fill in the names of the sports they play?
3. The question of how to define terms is going to come up. If they are collecting data on television watching, for example, what kinds of things will they need to agree on so that they are sure they end up counting the same things when people fill out their survey?
4. Decide on a format for this questionnaire. Explore the importance of asking questions in standard ways (both benefits and drawbacks) and how to organize the questionnaire effectively. Look at the Summary tables section to get some ideas on what to include in your questionnaire. Look at Statistics: Power from Data and Teacher's Guide to Data Discovery for tips on how to organize a questionnaire.

Step two: Analysing the results

When they have collected all the data, students can start to look for patterns in interesting ways. Here are some things you could talk about:

1. Can you describe the life of a 'typical' student from your census? What can you say? If you want to introduce the idea of central tendency, this would be a place to talk about averages, or means. You can explore the idea of range as well. What are the differences between the typical profile and the extremes? For example, what is the average amount of time students spend on computers outside school? What is the least amount of time anyone spends? What is the most? How close to the average are these extremes, and why is that interesting to know? The Measures of central tendency section of Statistics: Power from Data can be helpful here.
2. How can we represent these data effectively? Look at the Graph types section of Statistics: Power from Data and the Understanding data concepts section of Teacher's Guide to Data Discovery for tips on the most appropriate type of graph to use depending of the data.
3. If you are doing this with more than one classroom (either in your school or in a telecollaborative project) have students look at how close their class is to the average in each category. Are there places where they are different from the other classes? This is a place to talk in general about how much difference counts as 'significant.' How much difference is worth paying attention to, and how much can you ignore?
4. Do they think the picture of the 'average' student they have drawn would apply to students all across Canada? This is a place to talk about sample size and selection.
   1. Are there parts of the country where students of their age are likely to be quite different from what they see here?
   2. Do they think they would have to survey every student in the country to get a clear picture of what a ‘typical' Canadian of this age would be like?
5. If you can say what life is like for an average student, how would you answer a student who says, "But I'm not like that at all"? This is a place to talk about how statistics let you make generalizations about populations. The reverse process is not possible, however: you cannot go from a generalized statement about a group of students to say that this is what any particular student must then be like.
6. Go back to Summary tables. Here are some questions you could explore:
   How old are the people Statistics Canada surveyed? Why is there so little information collected about people under 15?
   1. Using the categories that they selected from the Summary tables list in the Student task, have the students discuss in what ways their lives are similar to the lives of older people in Canada.