This unit requires students to look at the reported state of bullying in New Zealand schools and to develop and administer their own surveys about bullying. They analyse their data and create a report outlining the results of their investigation.
This unit addresses both statistical investigations and statistical literacy. Statistical literacy is about critically examining claims made by others, that are based on data that has been gathered or accessed. Critique includes verifying the identification of important variables, sampling, the method of analysing the data, unbiased display of results, and most importantly, whether the data answers the investigative question, given uncertainty.
Statistical enquiry involves investigating a topic or area of interest, that involves an aspect of “I wonder”. The PPDAC cycle is an established part of the New Zealand Curriculum and is applied in this unit.
Ethical practices
At the core of ethical practices in statistical enquiry is the need to do good and to do no harm. Key practices include:
Interrogating survey questions
A guide to good survey design is a good resource to help with checking survey questions. See section 8.6 List of pitfalls to guard against and check for.
Interrogating statements made by others about statistical investigations
Prompts include:
The learning opportunities in this unit can be differentiated by providing or removing support to students and by varying the task requirements. Ways to support students include:
The context for this unit can be adapted to suit the interests and experiences of your students. Bullying is a commonly discussed topic in the media and is of personal interest to students. However, other topics can also be engaging, such finding out people’s attitudes about climate change, availability of fireworks or daylight saving. Note that the statistical enquiry process can be applied to many topics and selecting ones that are of interest to your students should always be a priority. You might collect data to find out which topics most interest your students.
In this unit students explore some statistics about bullying in New Zealand schools.
TIMSS 2014/15 and PISA 2015
Extra bullying data to explore if needed for the lesson
If there is time in the lesson, the 2015 CensusAtSchool questionnaire had four questions on bullying. Data from these questions were shared with the media in the form of press releases. More recent questionnaires have not included questions on bullying. However, it could be worth looking at CensusAtSchool questionnaires for other data to use with your class.
On 12 June 2015 CensusAtSchool made a press release with the heading: Verbal abuse the biggest bullying problem at school: Students.
Subsequently Radio New Zealand, Maori Television, NZ Herald, and Stuff (twice) published their own articles based on the CensusAtSchool press release. See links to all articles here.
Students can read the original press release and then in groups pick one of the other press articles and compare the press articles with the original press release. Ask the students what they think they should compare. E.g. is the data used in the article the same as the press release, what additional reporting has been included, is it relevant to the topic?
Copymaster 2 has nine graphs made from a sample of 1000 students from the CensusAtSchool 2015 database. See if these graphs support the evidence in the original press release.
You can make your own graphs by downloading a sample from the CensusAtSchool data viewer. Agree to the conditions of use; in the plan section select the CensusAtSchool NZ 2015 database, for the total sample size put 1000. Then select get data. This results in the Analysis section coming up, and therefore the option for graphing. Select the variable(s) to investigate, then select "do analysis". Students can do additional analyses by repeating the process - select a variable, then select "do analysis". The graphs stack up on the screen.
Introducing the PROBLEM
Today we have explored existing data on bullying in New Zealand in preparation to undertake our own statistical investigations on bullying. This will be our topic to investigate. Over the next few lessons we will explore developing a questionnaire, collecting and analysing data and reporting our findings.
In this second lesson we will explore existing survey questions on bullying to help us to see the structure of survey questions and to consider good ethical practices for collecting data, especially for potentially sensitive topics. We will look at the different types of survey questions that might be asked.
CensusAtSchool 2015
The 2015 questionnaire for CensusAtSchool had four questions on bullying.
In preparation for completing the online questionnaire teachers were provided with a PowerPoint to support their students with the sensitive topic. Show your students the PowerPoint 2 presentation, including the introduction to CensusAtSchool.
The first three slides set up the purpose for CensusAtSchool and talk about participating in the census. Understanding the purpose of a survey is important for those who choose to participate.
The next three slides discuss the bullying survey questions. The slides allow the teacher to introduce the topic of bullying, definitions of bullying, the idea of getting consistent responses for the survey and where to go for support.
Share the four questions on bullying from the 2015 CensusAtSchool survey (Copymaster 4). Ask the students to think about how they would respond to these survey questions and then to discuss how they would feel about answering these survey questions? How are these survey questions about bullying different to the ones we looked at earlier? How are they similar?
These are all ideas that can inform the students developing their own survey questions about bullying.
Collecting demographic data
In the next lesson students will develop survey questions about bullying. One of the areas to think about is what demographic data should be collected.
Demographic data includes data about ethnicity, gender, location, education, class level, position in family etc. Demographic data is often used to split the data into groups to compare. For example, two of the graphs (Graphs 6 and 9) from the CensusAtSchool survey (Copymaster 2) on bullying show the data compared by gender. Graph 6 is also shown below.
What personal information should be found out about the students?
Students might suggest the usual demographic variables such as age, class level, gender, and ethnicity. They may suggest other variables of interest, such as position in the family, e.g. first born, middle child, youngest child.
Ask the students if we should ask for people’s names and why or why not? Hopefully, they will say no and make links to confidentiality and validity (i.e. people might not answer honestly if they can be identified).
It is good to also ask about other demographic data that they have suggested.
Which of these might also identify people too easily, even if we do not have people's names?
Suggestions could include ethnicity, especially if there is only one child of a certain ethnic group in a class, and even ethnicity with gender – a single girl or boy of one ethnicity.
Remind students that the topic we are investigating is bullying. We will develop survey questions to explore the topic in this lesson. To investigate the topic we need to think about the areas of bullying that we could target.
Share with the students that bullying surveys usually include sections of survey questions. The sections are based on what the investigators want to find out. Common themes are:
Reflect on previous survey questions from lesson two and identify which of these themes the survey questions are about.
Developing survey questions on bullying
Ask your students to choose four themes and write one or two survey questions for each one. Suggest limited response survey questions rather than open survey questions to keep data handling manageable. Handling of open response data is dealt with later. You may want to discuss PowerPoint 3 which shows the three most common types of closed survey questions. Focus on the advantages and disadvantages of closed survey questions.
Let your students work in teams of three to develop survey questions. Preferably they should do so digitally so the survey questions can be edited, and combined with others, to form the final survey. Provide feedback as you go around.
Will the survey questions provide important data?
Are the survey questions simply, and briefly written?
Are the words and phrases unambiguous?
Does each survey question include only one idea, not multiple ideas?
Are the survey questions neutral, avoid leading statements, and offer a full range of options for students to choose?
About ethics:
Is the survey question one that students at our school would be happy to answer?
Are the survey questions sensitive to different cultural and religious perspectives?
Before sharing survey questions with the class, ask the students to trial each survey question with at least two other students who are not in their team. The survey questions should be rewritten if needed.
Share a few of the survey questions with the whole class. Focus on the above criteria for good survey questions. Organise the survey questions under the seven themes above.
Defining our investigative questions
Our next task is to develop a questionnaire to answer our investigative questions. First though we need to define our investigative questions we want to answer.
Reflecting on all the exploration and development work we have done to date, pose 2-3 investigative questions that we can answer through collecting data about bullying. The themes we have looked at previously will help you with this. [For more on posing investigative questions see Travel to school]
Creating a questionnaire to answer our investigative questions
Display all the survey questions that were developed under the theme headings. Students develop a bullying questionnaire in teams of three. Set the restriction that the survey must:
Have the class pool of survey questions stored digitally on an accessible drive so that students can cut and paste to form their questionnaires. It is a good idea to introduce checking once the questionnaires are drafted. Each group can check to see that the questionnaire of another group is sound.
Once the questionnaires are checked and completed these should be entered into an online survey tool, such as Google Forms or SurveyMonkey. Be aware that some platforms often incur a charge. Two advantages of digital platforms are that the data is entered by respondents, and the data is downloadable as a spreadsheet.
Prepare for the surveys to be completed by other classes. Think about the ethics of data collection as a class and which of these are important in the invitation we send and the information we give to the classes that will complete our surveys for us. The main ideas to discuss here are:
These ideas can also inform an introduction to the survey which outlines things such as the survey is anonymous, no names are collected, and no identifying information is asked.
In the final reflection part of the unit students are required to report their findings about bullying. They are also encouraged to think about their process of investigation and what they have learned from it.
Dear family and whānau,
This week we will be exploring how data can be used to inform people about issues. We will look at data about bullying, how that data is obtained, and the implications of it. Using that knowledge, we will create a survey to use with other students, gather some data, analyse the data, and report the findings. Our report will make recommendations.
Printed from https://nzmaths.co.nz/resource/how-much-bullying at 2:41am on the 26th April 2024