Jessica Elena Brodsky and Elizabeth Sergile
Instructions
For this semester-long project, you will be asked to write a proposal for research project in which you will analyze data from the U.S. Census to answer a question of your choosing. You will work together with a small group and coordinate via Microsoft Teams to complete this project. Beginning of the Semester: Preliminary Analyses
- Start by learning about the United States Census: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Census
- To create your group for this project, you will rank your top five regions of the United States. I will use this information to group students based on shared regions of interest.
- Once groups are formed, you will be provided with the Census data file for 2010.
- You will be asked to conduct preliminary analyses on your region’s Census data by providing descriptive statistics about your region (descriptive = describing). This will also help you get to know what data is collected by the Census.
| East North Central Illinois (IL) Indiana (IN) Michigan (MI) Ohio (OH) Wisconsin (WI) | East South Central Alabama (AL) Kentucky (KY) Mississippi (MS) Tennessee (TN) | Middle Atlantic New Jersey (NJ) New York (NY) Pennsylvania (PA) | Mountain Arizona (AZ) Colorado (CO) Idaho (ID) Montana (MT) New Mexico (NM) Nevada (NV) Utah (UT) Wyoming (WY) | New England Connecticut (CT) Maine (ME) Massachusetts (MA) New Hampshire (NH) Rhode Island (RI) Vermont (VT) |
| Pacific California (CA) Oregon (OR) Washington (WA) | South Atlantic Delaware (DE) Florida (FL) Georgia (GA) Maryland (MD) North Carolina (NC) South Carolina (SC) Virginia (VA) West Virginia (WV) | West North Central Iowa (IA) Kansas (KS) Minnesota (MN) Missouri (MO) Nebraska (NE) North Dakota (ND) South Dakota (SD) | West South Central Arkansas (AR) Louisiana (LA) Oklahoma (OK) Texas (TX) | Click here to make your selections. |
Middle of the Semester: Identifying Your Research Question
- Now that you are familiar with types of Census data collected and your region, you will identify a research question that you can answer using Census data for your region. To help you identify your research question, first think about the target audience for your proposal – this it the group of people that would be interested in some of the data collected by the Census. Then , think about what research questions that group of people would be interested in answering. Make sure that you can justify why this research question is of interest to your target audience.
- To demonstrate that it is feasible to answer your research question using the Census data, identify the specific variables that you will need to extract from the Census data for your analyses.
- With your group, complete Module A5 of the Socio-Technical Sustainability Roadmap to help your group determine how you will organize and document your project. This is a great opportunity to get familiar with Microsoft Teams and determine which features of this tool you will use for managing the different parts of your project.
- In class, each group will be asked to briefly present your research question, variables of interest, and project documentation plan to the class. You will have the opportunity to revise these three components based on feedback from me and your peers before submitting this part of the assignment.
End of the Semester: Addressing Your Research Question
- Now it’s time to write your proposal. In this proposal, you should:
- Provide descriptives of your region using Census data from your region
- Describe your target audience
- Provide your research question
- Explain why this question would be of interest to your target audience
- Identify variables of interest
- Identify descriptive and inferential tests that you will conduct and explain why they are appropriate for your data and research question
- Describe how you will visualize your results and explain why the visualization is appropriate for your data
- Once everyone’s proposal are submitted, you will be asked to peer-review each others proposal using the online rubric available here (see below for Evaluation Rubric).
Evaluation Rubric
Using this rubric document, evaluate each division’s proposal. Use a new copy for each division you will evaluate. Please use this link to deposit your completed evaluations.
Response: Course Context
A brief statement of the context of the course (discipline, level, institution type, instructional mode, is it real or imagined) This assignment is for an Introductory Statistics course that qualifies as Quantitative Reasoning course, as defined by CUNY Pathways. The course is taught face-to-face. This course is imagined, though Liz has taught Intro to Business Statistics and Statistics for Social Sciences; and Jessica has taught Experimental Psychology at Hunter, which incorporates review of basic statistical concepts and tests. Course Goals:
- Understand foundational statistical concepts
- Conduct and interpret appropriate statistical tests
- Apply statistics to real-world problems
- Demonstrate findings and conclusions using interpretative software
- Communicate and participate in group work both face-to-face and virtually
Why is this the final?
Statistics is one the most challenging courses for instructors to teach (Conners, McCown, Roskos-Ewoldsen, 1998). Challenges include motivating students, helping students overcome their math anxiety, reconciling wide variations in students’ performance, and ensuring content retention. One of the most challenging aspects of an introductory statistics course is helping students see the relevance of the knowledge and skills they are learning to the issues in their lives. Students often leave a statistics course with more knowledge, but no change in their attitudes or perceived ability in statistics and worse perceptions of the usefulness of statistics (Sizemore & Lewandowski, 2009). Therefore, the goal of this assignment is to help students apply the knowledge and skills they’ve gained in this course to answering a research question that they consider to be relevant. We chose to break this project up into a 3-part semester-long final project because it is an introductory-level course and we wanted to be able to provide students with feedback and guidance throughout the assignment. We also wanted students to have time to practice communicating and collaborating via an online tool, like Microsoft Teams.
Technologies
Microsoft Teams provides a cohesive platform for communications, working in groups, collecting information. Teams empowers students to create groups, work plans, documentation and to track deliverables in a way that allows them to be in charge of the workflow and to practice using a tool that is being used in the workplace across various industries. Students will get to add this to their resumes.
SPSS and/or Excel will be used for data-analysis and to produce data visualizations. These tools have easy-to-navigate interfaces, and will produce insights for discussion.PowerPoint will be used to share proposed methodologies and insights. The rubrics for evaluation are Word documents that will be collected via Teams and shared with each group.
Evaluation Rubric
The evaluation rubric is from the Association of American Colleges and Universities. This rubric is considered a standard in assessing quantitative reasoning and quantitative literacy skills nationwide. By using this students will gain the experience of using external criteria to frame their assessments. Students will also provide structured feedback to their colleagues.
