7  A Small Project

This assignment is very much like the previous one, with enhancements.

7.1 What’s the same?

The data: pick from

(has income, education, race, etc)

(2015–2018)

What do I do?

  • Predict something. Make a claim.
  • Do a quick investigation. Display a table or graph. Reflect on what it says.
  • Dig deeper: Figure out how that can be enhanced (make it more nuanced; or investigate something related, inspired by the original; or play devil’s advocate, etc.)
  • Collect data, analyze it, and make a table or graph that speaks to the issue
  • Reflect on what you found out. Possibly, dig even deeper and reflect again.
  • Make a shared link to your CODAP document.

Logistics

  • Make it a Google Doc for simplicity.1
  • Give your instructor edit permission on the document. They will get an email with the link, so that’s how you can turn it in.
  • The report should include a link to the shared CODAP document.

7.2 What’s enhanced?

You may pick your topic

  • Advice: mess around with the data before you decide. Make graphs. Think about what they mean. A question or a claim will occur to you. Note:
  • If you choose BART data, the BART Data Portal chapter has a section with suggestions for BART topics. That section also has instructions about the “secret meeting game.” Finding the secret meeting is a suitable topic for this investigation.
  • If you choose Census/ACS data, you may have already started looking at social-justice topics in a previous assignment, through income differences. That’s a fruitful direction (though not the only one).

Other enhancements

  • If it makes sense (and it probably will), do a second “dig deeper” cycle.
  • Communication is part of data science:
    • Make this work stand alone. Do not assume that the reader has read the assignment.
    • Similarly, give it narrative sense
      • It’s not a numbered list of steps! Make paragraphs! Make them flow!
      • The opening paragraph, or some text near it, should motivate the investigation. Why is this interesting—even a little bit?
    • Pay attention to space. Usually, if you just paste your graph into the document, it will be bigger than it has to be.
    • Make your graphs sing!
  • Recoding might be useful: making a new column that’s more what you want
  • Briefly describe the data at an appropriate place in the report, including the sample size(s).
  • When you present an analysis, explain what you did. If you used “data moves,” say so! Did you filter? Did you write a summary formula (like with sum( )? What was it?)
  • Did you drag a column to the left to make groups? Why did you choose that column?
  • Do not exceed three pages.
  • Vital: somewhere, perhaps in your conclusions, reflect on this experience. What interests you about this? (Or not; be honest!) How is this different from your experience with school math classes?

7.3 Commentary

Ideally, the previous assignment prepared students well for this project. Do plan on class time to help them, and remind them of various resources such as their peers and this book.

Despite any warnings you might have given about keeping the projects small, some students will probably want to do things that go beyond what you have covered in class. Here are three that happened to us:

Recoding: Suppose they have income and want to get rid of the number. Instead, they want categories, like “none,” “not much,” and “a lot,” based on some cut points in the numeric income attribute. This is called recoding.

They will want a new attribute, a new column, whose value depends on the income attribute. (They should not eliminate that original, but make a new one.) There are two basic strategies: make a formula (which in this case will have some if() statements); or do something that involves typing values into cells. If you have 1000 cases, the typing strategy had better be pretty strategic!

They will find some ideas about how to do this in the chapter on the calculating data move.

This data move, which we call calculating, resembles summarizing, but it creates a new value for each case in a collection rather than a value that summarizes a group. Both data moves often—but not always—use formulas.

Another classic use of recoding comes up with the Hispanic attribute. It has many categories (notHispanic, Mexican, Guatemalan, Cuban, etc…). It would be great, in some situations, to have a simpler version of that column, maybe called LatinX with only two values: Sí and No. That section explains an easy way to do that.

Adding data from elsewhere: Sometimes you want to connect the data from two datasets together. This is another data move, called joining, which you can read about in its own chapter.

Joining can be ridiculously complex, but our student’s idea was reasonable and straightforward: they wanted to compare education levels for people from the richest five States with education levels from the poorest five States. The ACS data did not rate States by wealth, but it’s easy to find a listing on Google.

So they simply asked only for data from those ten States, and then recoded the state names into a new column with values rich and poor.

Getting your own data: Some students may find data about something else that excites them online. If they find a csv file with the data they want, they can drag and drop it into CODAP as described in this section on importing files.

The danger for you, the teacher, is that they get data for which grouping and summarizing don’t make sense. So you may want to have them get approval if they stray too far from the data sources we suggest.

Income inequality and Census data

If a student chooses Census data and your claim has a social-justice feel to it, there’s a good chance that it’s at least partly about income inequality.

Note that there are (at least) two different ways we talk about income differences:

  • Some groups earn more than others. You often hear about this in the news as a “gender gap” or “race gap” in income.
  • Within a group, the difference between the richest and the poorest might be especially large. You often hear about “rising income inequality,” that is, that difference now is bigger than it was in the past. Or we might compare the USA with, say, Sweden, where incomes are more equal. To do this comparison, you need a number: a measure of income inequality. One such measure is the “Gini coefficient.”

Trying to come up with your own measure of income inequality is an interesting challenge.

Assessing the Project

Ernie Chen, the teacher-of-record for the Applied Math class where we ran this in 2020, used this simple 20-point plan. Use or modify as you wish:

Clearly-stated claim 1
Initial graph 3
Does the graph show or refute initial claim? 1
Grouping: dragging to the left 3
Summary column creation 3
Enhancement: dig deeper 4
Communication/writing/readability 4
Reflection 1

  1. Your instuctor may allow other formats. PDF? Video?↩︎