Surveys & Gathering Data

One of the things that we were assigned to explore this week is the creation of surveys.  This is something that I am somewhat familiar with since my students created a survey to gauge the thoughts of people about the Budget Repair Bill that was proposed by Governor Scott Walker this spring.  The main thing that I wanted my students to understand is that the data you can get from an experiment or a survey can be severely impacted by bias.  This could be bias that is found in the questions that are asked or the sample that is used to find the answers to your question.  My students, when creating their questions let their bias (against Scott Walker) influence the questions.  The population sample was also tainted due to being done in a school where most people had a natural bias against their pay and benefits being changed to a smaller figure.  So after all of the work my students did, I had them analyze the data.  To no ones surprise, the feelings about the budget bill and Governor Scott Walker were negative.  However, when my students realized that they had biased questions and sample, they understood that the data that they received was not representative of the state of Wisconsin as a whole, but only of one Milwaukee Public Schools middle school.

Week 2 CEDO 540

The statistical mean has had an extreme impact on some kids I deal with recently.  I was fortunate enough to be able to help coach the Milwaukee Swim team entry for the U.S. Youth Games in Cocoa, Florida.  Instead of using an automatic timing system (such as a Colorado Timing System) the Youth Games used 2 timers per each lane and then the meet manager would "average" the two times and record the "averaged time" to find the place of each entrant.  Unfortunately for one of our swimmers, even though she out touched the other swimmer, one of her timers stopped the timer late.  This meant that her mean time was 0.17 seconds slower than the other swimmer.  So, according to the mean, she did not win the race.  Unfortunately, this also meant that she did not get the points a first place finish would get.  The difference between getting first and second place points in this one race was great enough that our girls ended up getting 3rd place overall in the meet.  They only missed second place by 2 points.  However, our boys won second place and had enough points for the team total points won the team a second place finish.  Kudos to my wife for a great job coaching.