Wednesday, February 20, 2013

Learning how to use excel to analyse data better

Dear Students,
 For this class exercise, we are looking into how we can use simple graphs and charts to represent data and understand relationships between different data better.

 We usually use a simple co-relation efficient to talk about relationship between data.

It is a simple qualitative approach that gives people an idea of the strength of the relationship between 2 different sets of data.

 The degree of the relationship (positive or negative) can be quantified by calculating the R ( correlation coefficient).

Excel provides a very quick way of calculating the "line of best fit" to allow us to see the R value very fast.

A "R value" that is close to 1 means there is a strong positive relationship between the sets of data. As X increase, Y also increase.

A "R value" that is close to -1 means there is a strong negative relationship between the sets of data. As X increase, Y decreases.

Pay attention in class as Mrs Lim demonstrates the use of excel for item 1 and 3 in TASK B.

TASK A: THINK TIME:
What happens when you get a value that is close to 0? Discuss!

TASK B: EXCEL TIME (Work in pairs or trios, according to sharing of computers in class)
Download the data file from Espace IH2013 module workbin.

Open the file in Excel.

As a class, we will discuss the best way to represent data to aid the following investigations:


  1. Co-relation of population size and energy consumption per capita
  2. Co-relation of GDP per capita and energy consumption per capita
  3. Comparison of types of countries and their energy consumption per capita
  4. Comparsion of GDP per capita and energy consumption per capita according to types of countries 

Preparation for first lesson in Week 8:

  1. Discuss the data representations and the implications of what you observe.
  2. What do the analyse suggest about the distribution of resources? 
  3. How do the implications affect the way these countries tackle global issues on the environment?

Gdrive link: https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B0NH1U79c6yJSDZaNU5kWUNRelE/edit?usp=sharing


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