By R.B. Campbell
(Grades 6-8, 9-12+) This activity, published in April of 2014, provides a foundation for distinguishing between qualitative (categorical) and quantitative data and how they can be summarized and analyzed (a topic encountered early in a statistics course).
This lesson illustrates how categorical data can be grouped to make the data comprehensible. It also allows for discussion of the validity of such groupings. Students will select four adjectives they think characterize themselves from a provided list so they can characterize the class as a whole. They will then discover there are too many adjectives to comprehend the data and try to group the words into categories so the data is easier to comprehend. Finally, they will be given categories (provided with this exercise), but will need to decide whether they are meaningful groupings and whether any important information has been lost by the grouping. This also illustrates how important it is to carefully pose questions in a survey if you want to analyze the results, particularly that it may be necessary to have subjects choose from a list of responses, rather than allow free response.
Keywords: Grades 6-8, 9-12+, categorical data, frequency tables, survey design