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Case Study – Secondary school – St. James School, Exeter

Year 7 (11-12 year old) students investigated with 9 lessons if weather (such as Hourly Temperature, Hourly Mean Wind Direction, Hourly Relative Humidity, Hourly Global Radiation etc.) might be related to students’ behaviours in schools (school’s behaviour points, late to school, etc.). Key skills are interpretation of scatter graphs, graphical data, interpretation of averages and drawing conclusions from data.

Data sets were provided by the Met office as well as the school.

Data set — Dunkeswell Aerodrome Daily 1_9_2018-29_5_2019

The students have studied basic statistical concepts, such as appropriate graphical representation involving discrete, continuous and grouped data; and appropriate measures of central tendency (mean, mode, median) based on the UK national curriculum.

Lessons were carefully sequenced by first inspiring students’ interests (e.g. climate change, YouTube, etc.), checking their knowledge with Knowledge organisers, identifying skills needed and then explore data with CODAP. The students have already used CODAP before, and the students seemed no difficulties to read scatter graphs to make their inferences. Their findings which are summarised in a video clip are, for example:

  • Students’ behaviours might be worse on Thursday as well as being late to the school on Monday.
  • The median of daily max temperature collected in 2018/19 is 1.3 degree higher that the median of 1988/89.
  • They found a positive correlation between daily radiation and bad behaviours in the school. Also there was a positive correlation between daily radiation and daily maximum temperatures.

A post attitude survey suggests that the students have more positive attitudes towards learning statistical concepts and less stressed during the learning. Also their confidence using ICT tools were increased.

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