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July 5, 2006
Gapminder: how to use as a teaching tool?
Graham Webster pointed me to this interesting site that's full of data and graphs. Should be great for teaching, and for research too, in enabling people to look up and graph data quickly.
I'd like to develop some homework assignments and class-participation activities based on this site. We should be able to do better than to tell students: Hey, look at this, it's cool!
To start with, one could set students on to it and ask them to find pairs of variables with negative correlations, or pairs of variables that are approximately independent, or pairs that have zero correlation but are not independent. Or one student could pick a pair of variables, and the other could guess the regression slope.
I'm sure more could be done: the challenge is to get the students to be thinking hard, and anticipating the patterns before they see the data, rather than simply passively looking at cool patterns.
Posted by Andrew at July 5, 2006 6:27 AM
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Comments
I tutor introductory statistics and I have been using Gapminder for awhile. However, this is a slightly newer version, the original allowed the user to choose the axises and the included countries.
At the beginning of this summer I typically showed a positive correlation (and slope) by graphing life expectancy versus GNP per capita (which is now chart 5). Then I showed them an uncorrelated relationship by plotting life expectancy versus women as a percentage of work force. After that I would choose two variables and asked the student if it would be positively, negatively, or uncorrelated. We then watched the ensuing animation.
I did this with the old tool (link is above), so I am not sure how I like these pre-chosen charts.
Posted by: Tom at July 5, 2006 11:37 AM.
I am using Gapminder to teach direct and inverse correlations between data, but I'm doing this with high school freshmen. Basically what I did was I told them what direct correlation means, gave them some simple examples from their everyday lives, and then have them play with Gapminder in pairs to find some pairs of variables that give direct correlation. Then I asked them to find countries that fall out of the general trend and to figure out, based on common sense, why the quantities are in direct correlation. Same with inverse/negative correlations. It took them 45 minutes or so but they finally figured out what the data look like for these two types of relationships! It took longer than expected (what doesn't?) but it's working out really well for the kids. I'd imagine that it'll work even better for older students like the ones you have. The hard part is to keep them off Facebook during the exercise!
Posted by: Wing at February 12, 2008 10:47 PM.