Teachers' Notes for Count Yourself In!
(use "Side-by-side" link to view the Student Task)

Step One: Creating a Survey

The issue of what to include in a survey is very important. When you have discussions with students, be sure to spend time talking about matters like this:

1. What "broad" categories ( eg sports, television watching, how people get to school, number of adult teeth that have grown in, eating habits….) do you think would help give people a really good picture of your life as a student?

• Follow some of the Statistics links to see what Statistics Canada counts when they try and "paint a picture" of what life is like for Canadians. Talk to students about whether they might want to use some of these categories, or add ones that they think would give a better picture of their actual lives.
• Statistics Canada counts many things to give people a picture of what life is like for Canadians over the age of 15.
• As a final step in the project, students will be able to compare data they have generated with Statistics Canada data about our population in general. There are real benefits to including some of the same categories for purposes of comparison. There are also real benefits to looking at what important information about their lives adults might have ignored
• Discuss whether they think the picture of life for them will look different from the life of adult Canadians.

2. Within each category, you and your students will need to decide what kinds of specific questions students should ask people when they start counting. Thus, under Sports, which specific sports do they think they should collect data about? What's the best way of doing that? Can they see any problems when they decide in advance which sports to include in their survey, and which ones to leave out? Can they see any problems if they just leave a blank under the word "Sports" and let people fill in the names of the sports they play?

3. The question of how to define terms is going to come up. If they are collecting data on television watching, for example, what kinds of things will they need to agree on so that they are sure they end up counting the same things when people fill out their survey?

4. Decide on a format for this questionnaire. Explore the importance of asking questions in standard ways (both benefits and drawbacks) and how to organize the questionnaire effectively. Look at the tables in the Statistics Canada section to get some ideas about how to organize a questionnaire.

Step Two: Analyzing the Results

When you have collected all the data, students can start to look for patterns in interesting ways. Here are some things you could talk about:

1. Can you describe the life of a "typical" student from your census? What can you say? If you want to introduce the idea of central tendencies, this would be a place to talk about averages, or means. You can explore the idea of range as well. What are the differences between the "typical" profile, and the extremes? For example, what is the average amount of time students spend on computers outside school? What is the least amount of time anyone spent? The most? How close to the "average" are these extremes, and why is that interesting to know about?

2. How can we represent this data effectively?

3. If you are doing this with more than one classroom (either in your school or in a telecollaborative project) have students look at close their class is to the "average" in each category? Are there places where they are different from the other classes? This is a place to talk in general about how much difference counts as significant. How much difference is worth paying attention to, and how much can you ignore?

4. Do they think the picture of the "average" student they have drawn would apply to students all across Canada? This is a place to talk about sample size and selection.

• Are there parts of the country where students of their age are likely to be quite different from what they see here?
• Do they think they would have to survey every student in the country to get a clear picture of what a "typical" Canadian of this age would be like?

5. If you can say what life is like for an average student, how would you answer a student who says, "But I'm not like that at all"? This is a place to talk about how statistics lets you make generalizations about populations. The reverse process is not possible, however: you cannot go from a generalized statement about a group of students to say that this is what any particular student must then be like.

6. Go back to the Statistics Canada data on the Canadian population. Here are some questions you could explore:

• How old are the people Statistics Canada surveyed? Why is there so little information collected about people under 12?
• Using the categories that they used from the Statistics Canada list, in what ways are their lives similar to the lives of older people in Canada