Analyze how the text works. Outline the text paragraph by paragraph. Are there any patterns in the topics the writer addresses? How has the writer arranged ideas, and how does that arrangement develop the topic? Identify patterns. Look for notable patterns in the text: recurring words and their synonyms, repeated phrases and metaphors, and types of sentences.
Does the author rely on any particular writing strategies? Is the evidence offered more opinion than fact? Is there a predominant pattern to how sources are presented? As quotations? In visual texts, are there any patterns of color, shape, and line? Consider the larger context. What other arguments is he or she responding to? Who is cited? Be persistent with difficult texts. For texts that are especially challenging or uninteresting, first try skimming the headings, the abstract or introduction, and the conclusion to look for something that relates to knowledge you already have.
As a critical reader, you need to look closely at the argument a text makes. Does his or her language include you, or not? Hint: if you see the word we, do you feel included? So learning to read and interpret visual texts is just as necessary as it is for written texts. Take visuals seriously. When they appear as part of a written text, they may introduce information not discussed elsewhere in the text.
It might also help to think about its purpose: Why did the writer include it? What information does it add or emphasize? What argument is it making? How to read charts and graphs. A line graph, for example, usually contains certain elements: title, legend, x-axis, y-axis, and source information. Figure 1 shows one such graph taken from a sociology textbook. Other types of charts and graphs include some of these same elements. But the specific elements vary according to the different Legend: Explains the symbols used.
Here, colors show the different categories. X-axis: Defines the dependent variable something that changes depending on other factors. Women in the labor force as a percent of the total labor force both men and women age sixteen and over. For example, the chart in Figure 2, from the same textbook, includes elements of both bar and line graphs to depict two trends at once: the red line shows the percentage of women who were in the US labor force from to , and the blue bars show the percentage of US workers who were women during that same period.
Both trends are shown in two-year increments. To make sense of this chart, you need to read the title, the y-axis labels, and the labels and their definitions carefully. Research Research is formalized curiosity. It is poking and prying with a purpose. We search the web for information about a new computer, ask friends about the best place to get coffee, try on several pairs of jeans before deciding which ones to buy.
Will you need to provide background information? What kinds of evidence will your audience find persuasive? What attitudes do they hold, and how can you best appeal to them? If so, which media will best reach your audience, and how will they affect the kind of information you search for? Is there a due date? How much time will your project take, and how can you best schedule your time in order to complete it?
If the assignment offers only broad guidelines, identify the requirements and range of possibilities, and define your topic within those constraints. As you consider topics, look to narrow your focus to be specific enough to cover in a research paper. Reference librarians can direct you to the most appropriate reference works, and library catalogs and databases provide sources that have been selected by experts. General encyclopedias and other reference works can provide an overview of your topic, while more specialized encyclopedias cover subjects in greater depth and provide other scholarly references for further research.
Some databases include documentation entries in several styles that you can simply copy and paste. Generate a list of questions beginning with What? Who should determine when and where fracking can be done? Should fracking be expanded? Select one question, and use it to help guide your research. Drafting a tentative thesis. Here are three tentative thesis statements, each one based on a previous research question about fracking: By injecting sand, water, and chemicals into rock, fracking may pollute drinking water and air.
The federal government should strictly regulate the production of natural gas by fracking. Fracking can greatly increase our supplies of natural gas, but other methods of producing energy should still be pursued. A tentative thesis will help guide your research, but you should be ready to revise it as you continue to learn about your subject and consider many points of view.
Which sources you turn to will depend on your topic. For a report on career opportunities in psychology, you might interview someone working in the field. Primary sources are original works, such as historical documents, literary works, eyewitness accounts, diaries, letters, and lab studies, as well as your own original field research. Secondary sources include scholarly books and articles, reviews, biographies, and other works that interpret or discuss primary sources. Whether a source is considered primary or secondary sometimes depends on your topic and purpose.
Scholarly and popular sources. Popular sources, on the other hand, are written for a general audience, and while they may discuss scholarly research, they are more likely to summarize that research than to report on it in detail. Catchy, provocative titles usually signal that a source is popular, not scholarly. Scholarly sources are written by authors with academic credentials; popular sources are most often written by journalists or staff writers.
Includes an abstract. Multiple authors who are academics. Author not an academic. Consider how much prior knowledge readers are assumed to have. Are specialized terms defined, and are the people cited identified in some way? Look as well at the detail: scholarly sources describe methods and give more detail, often in the form of numerical data; popular sources give less detail, often in the form of anecdotes.
Scholarly sources are published by academic journals, university presses, and professional organizations such as the Modern Language Association; popular sources are published by general interest magazines such as Time or Fortune or trade publishers such as Norton or Penguin.
Scholarly journal articles often begin with an abstract or summary of the article; popular magazine articles may include a tag line giving some sense of what the article covers, but less than a formal summary. Scholarly sources have URLs that end in. Keep in mind that searching requires flexibility, both in the words you use and in the methods you try. For some topics, you might find specialized reference works such as the Film Encyclopedia or Dictionary of Philosophy, which provide in-depth information on a single field or topic and can often lead you to more specific sources.
Many reference works are also online, but some may be available only in the library. Wikipedia can often serve as a starting point for preliminary research and includes links to other sources, but since its information can be written and rewritten by anyone, make sure to consult other reference works as well. You can find bibliographies in many scholarly articles and books. Check with a reference librarian for help finding bibliographies on your research topic. You can search the catalog by author, title, subject, or keyword.
Many books in the catalog are also available online, and some may be downloaded to a computer or mobile device. Indexes list articles by topics; databases usually provide full texts or abstracts. While some databases and indexes are freely available online, most must be accessed through a library. EBSCOhost provides databases of abstracts and complete articles from periodicals and government documents. InfoTrac offers full-text articles from scholarly and popular sources, including the New York Times.
JSTOR archives many scholarly journals but not current issues. Humanities International Index contains bibliographies for over 2, humanities journals. MLA International Bibliography indexes scholarly articles on modern languages, literature, folklore, and linguistics. PsycINFO indexes scholarly literature in psychology. Because it is so vast and dynamic, however, finding information can be a challenge. Google, Bing, Yahoo! Yippy, Dogpile, and SurfWax let you use several search sites simultaneously.
They are best for searching broadly; use a single site to obtain the most precise results. For peer-reviewed academic writing in many disciplines, try Google Scholar; or use Scirus for scientific, technical, and medical documents. Following are a few of the many resources available on the web. You can find information put together by specialists at The Voice of the Shuttle a guide to online resources in the humanities ; the WWW Virtual Library a catalog of websites on numerous subjects, compiled by subject specialists ; or in subject directories such as those provided by Google and Yahoo!
News sites. Many newspapers, magazines, and radio and TV stations have websites that provide both up-to-the-minute information and also archives of older news articles. Through Google News and NewsLink, for example, you can access current news worldwide, and Google News Archive Search has files extending back to the s.
Government sites. Many government agencies and departments maintain websites where you can find government reports, statistics, legislative information, and other resources. Audio, video, and image collections. Your library likely subscribes to various databases where you can find and download audio, video, and image files. AP Images provides access to photographs taken for the Associated Press; Artstor is a digital library of images; Naxos Music Library contains more than 60, recordings.
Digital archives. You can find primary sources from the past, including drawings, maps, recordings, speeches, and historic documents at sites maintained by the National Archives, the Library of Congress, the New York Public Library, and others. Three kinds of field research that you might consider are interviews, observations, and surveys. If you wish to record the interview, ask for permission. Some writing projects are based on information you get by observing something.
How does this observation relate to your research goals, and what do you expect to find? Also note details about the setting.
Then analyze your notes, looking for patterns. What did you learn? Did anything surprise or puzzle you? One way of gathering information from a large number of people is to use a questionnaire. Multiple-choice questions will be easier to tally than openended questions.
Be sure to give a due date and to say thank you. A Google search on the same topic produces over ten thousand hits. How do you decide which ones to read?
This chapter presents advice on evaluating potential sources and reading those you choose critically. What kinds of sources will they find persuasive? How well does it relate to your purpose? What would it add to your work? To see what it covers, look at the title and at any introductory material such as a preface or an abstract.
Has the author written other works on this subject? Is he or she known for a particular position on it? If the credentials are not stated, you might do a search to see what else you can learn about him or her.
Does the source cover various points of view or advocate only one perspective? Does its title suggest a certain slant? If the source is a book, what kind of company published it; if an article, what kind of periodical did it appear in? Books published by university presses and articles in scholarly journals are reviewed by experts before they are published.
But books and articles written for the general public do not undergo rigorous review or fact-checking. Is the site maintained by an organization, an interest group, a government agency, or an individual? Look for clues in the URL:.
Can you understand it? Texts written for a general audience might be easier to understand but not authoritative enough for academic work. Scholarly texts will be more authoritative but may be hard to comprehend. Check to see when books and articles were published and when websites were last updated. If a site lists no date, see if links to other sites still work; if not, the site is probably too dated to use.
If so, you can probably assume that some other writers regard it as trustworthy. Is there a bibliography that might lead you to other sources? How current or authoritative are the sources it cites? Pay attention to what they say, to the reasons and evidence they offer to support what they say, and to whether they address viewpoints other than their own.
Assume that each author is responding to some other argument. Does he or she present several different positions or argue for a particular position? What arguments is he or she responding to? How thoroughly does he or she consider alternative arguments? Does it seem objective, or does the content or language reveal a particular bias?
Are opposing views considered and treated fairly? Does it support a different argument altogether? Does it represent a position you need to address? Is the main purpose to inform readers about a topic or to argue a certain point? This chapter focuses on going beyond what your sources say to inspire and support what you want to say. What makes them so strong? Are there any that you need to address in what you write? Have you discovered new questions you need to investigate?
Entering the conversation. This is the exciting part of a research project, for when you write out your own ideas on the topic, you will find yourself entering that conversation. This chapter will help you with the specifics of integrating source materials into your writing and acknowledging your sources appropriately.
The following examples are shown in MLA style. To quote three lines or less of poetry in MLA style, run them in with your text, enclosed in quotation marks. Separate lines with slashes, leaving one space on each side of the slash.
Include the line numbers in parentheses at the end of the quotation. Set off long quotations block style. Longer quotations should not be run in with quotation marks but instead are set off from your text and indented from the left margin. What better way to get our attention? The solution for most nonprofits has been to show the despair. Indicate any additions or changes with brackets. Paraphrase when the source material is important but the original wording is not.
Because it includes all the main points and details of the source material, a paraphrase is usually about the same length as the original. These results helped explain why bladder cancers had become so prevalent among dyestuffs workers. With the invention of mauve in , synthetic dyes began replacing natural plant-based dyes in the coloring of cloth and leather. After mauve, the first synthetic dye, was invented in , leather and cloth manufacturers replaced most natural dyes made from plants with synthetic dyes, and by the early s textile workers had very high rates of bladder cancer.
The experiments with dogs revealed the connection Now see two examples that demonstrate some of the challenges of paraphrasing. The paraphrase below borrows too much of the original language or changes it only slightly, as the words and phrases highlighted in yellow show. Now-classic experiments in showed that when dogs were exposed to aromatic amines, chemicals used in synthetic dyes derived from coal, they developed bladder cancer.
Similar cancers were prevalent among dyestuffs workers, and these experiments helped to explain why. Mauve, a synthetic dye, was invented in , after which cloth and leather manufacturers replaced most of the natural plant-based dyes with synthetic dyes. These results helped researchers identify why cancers of the bladder had become so common among textile workers who worked with dyes.
With the development of mauve in , synthetic dyes began to be used instead of dyes based on plants in the dyeing of leather and cloth. By the end of the nineteenth century, rates of bladder cancer among these workers had increased dramatically, and the experiments using dogs helped clear up this oddity Steingraber One common mistake many writers make is to start by copying a passage directly from a source and then changing it: adding some words or deleting some words, replacing others with synonyms, altering sentence structures.
Use your own words and sentence structure. If you use any words from the original, put them in quotation marks. Unlike a paraphrase, a summary does not present the details, and it is generally as brief as possible. Summaries may boil down an entire book or essay into a single sentence, or they may take a paragraph or more to present the main ideas.
Here, for example, is a summary of the original excerpt from Steingraber see p. Signal verbs. The language you use in a signal phrase can be neutral, like X says or according to Y.
The example above referring to the textbook author uses the verb argues, suggesting that what she says is disputable or that the writer believes it is. Science writer Isaac McDougal questions whether. For example: In other words, the data suggest that. Our theory challenges common assumptions about. Their hypothesis supposes. Verb tenses. Unless you know an awful lot about sodium and the serving sizes for granola cereal , that statement is not going to be particularly informative. Should we be worried about Al?
The easiest way to give meaning to these relative comparisons is by using percentages. Measuring change as a percentage gives us some sense of scale. You probably learned how to calculate percentages in fourth grade and will be tempted to skip the next few paragraphs. Fair enough. But first do one simple exercise for me. The assistant manager marks down all merchandise by 25 percent. What is the final price of the dress?
This is not merely a fun parlor trick that will win you applause and adulation at cocktail parties. Percentages are useful—but also potentially confusing or even deceptive. The numerator the part on the top of the fraction gives us the size of the change in absolute terms; the denominator the bottom of the fraction is what puts this change in context by comparing it with our starting point.
The increase will be. The point is that a percentage change always gives the value of some figure relative to something else. Therefore, we had better understand what that something else is. I once invested some money in a company that my college roommate started. Since it was a private venture, there were no requirements as to what information had to be provided to shareholders.
A number of years went by without any information on the fate of my investment; my former roommate was fairly tight-lipped on the subject. There was no information on the size of those profits in absolute terms, meaning that I still had absolutely no idea how my investment was performing. Suppose that last year the firm earned 27 cents—essentially nothing. To be fair to my roommate, he eventually sold the company for hundreds of millions of dollars, earning me a percent return on my investment.
Since you have no idea how much I invested, you also have no idea how much money I made—which reinforces my point here very nicely! Let me make one additional distinction. Percentage change must not be confused with a change in percentage points. Rates are often expressed in percentages. The sales tax rate in Illinois is 6. I pay my agent 15 percent of my book royalties.
These rates are levied against some quantity, such as income in the case of the income tax rate. Obviously the rates can go up or down; less intuitively, the changes in the rates can be described in vastly dissimilar ways. The best example of this was a recent change in the Illinois personal income tax, which was raised from 3 percent to 5 percent. There are two ways to express this tax change, both of which are technically accurate. The Democrats, who engineered this tax increase, pointed out correctly that the state income tax rate was increased by 2 percentage points from 3 percent to 5 percent.
The Republicans pointed out also correctly that the state income tax had been raised by 67 percent. Many phenomena defy perfect description with a single statistic. Suppose quarterback Aaron Rodgers throws for yards but no touchdowns. Meanwhile, Peyton Manning throws for a meager yards but three touchdowns. Who played better? The passer rating is an example of an index, which is a descriptive statistic made up of other descriptive statistics.
Once these different measures of performance are consolidated into a single number, that statistic can be used to make comparisons, such as ranking quarterbacks on a particular day, or even over a whole career.
If baseball had a similar index, then the question of the best player ever would be solved. Or would it? The advantage of any index is that it consolidates lots of complex information into a single number.
We can then rank things that otherwise defy simple comparison—anything from quarterbacks to colleges to beauty pageant contestants.
In the Miss America pageant, the overall winner is a combination of five separate competitions: personal interview, swimsuit, evening wear, talent, and onstage question.
Miss Congeniality is voted on separately by the participants themselves. Alas, the disadvantage of any index is that it consolidates lots of complex information into a single number. There are countless ways to do that; each has the potential to produce a different outcome. Malcolm Gladwell makes this point brilliantly in a New Yorker piece critiquing our compelling need to rank things.
Using a formula that includes twenty-one different variables, Car and Driver ranked the Porsche number one. If styling is given more weight in the overall ranking 25 percent , then the Lotus comes out on top. But wait. Gladwell also points out that the sticker price of the car gets relatively little weight in the Car and Driver formula. If value is weighted more heavily so that the ranking is based equally on price, exterior styling, and vehicle characteristics , the Chevy Corvette is ranked number one.
Any index is highly sensitive to the descriptive statistics that are cobbled together to build it, and to the weight given to each of those components. As a result, indices range from useful but imperfect tools to complete charades. The HDI was created as a measure of economic well-being that is broader than income alone. The HDI uses income as one of its components but also includes measures of life expectancy and educational attainment.
The United States ranks eleventh in the world in terms of per capita economic output behind several oil-rich nations like Qatar, Brunei, and Kuwait but fourth in the world in human development.
The HDI provides a handy and reasonably accurate snapshot of living standards around the globe. Descriptive statistics give us insight into phenomena that we care about. In that spirit, we can return to the questions posed at the beginning of the chapter. Who is the best baseball player of all time? More important for the purposes of this chapter, what descriptive statistics would be most helpful in answering that question? According to Steve Moyer, president of Baseball Info Solutions, the three most valuable statistics other than age for evaluating any player who is not a pitcher would be the following: 1.
On-base percentage OBP , sometimes called the on-base average OBA : Measures the proportion of the time that a player reaches base successfully, including walks which are not counted in the batting average. Slugging percentage SLG : Measures power hitting by calculating the total bases reached per at bat.
A single counts as 1, a double is 2, a triple is 3, and a home run is 4. At bats AB : Puts the above in context. Any mope can have impressive statistics for a game or two. Babe Ruth still holds the Major League career record for slugging percentage at. Again, I deferred to the experts.
Both gave variations on the same basic answer. They also recommended examining changes to wages at the 25th and 75th percentiles which can reasonably be interpreted as the upper and lower bounds for the middle class. One more distinction is in order. When assessing economic health, we can examine income or wages. They are not the same thing. A wage is what we are paid for some fixed amount of labor, such as an hourly or weekly wage. Income is the sum of all payments from different sources.
If workers take a second job or work more hours, their income can go up without a change in the wage. For that matter, income can go up even if the wage is falling, provided a worker logs enough hours on the job. The wage is a less ambiguous measure of how Americans are being compensated for the work they do; the higher the wage, the more workers take home for every hour on the job.
Having said all that, here is a graph of American wages over the past three decades. A variety of conclusions can be drawn from these data. Workers at the 90th percentile have done much, much better. Descriptive statistics help to frame the issue.
What we do about it, if anything, is an ideological and political question. However, the twist is that the difference between each observation and the mean is squared; the sum of those squared terms is then divided by the number of observations. Specifically: Because the difference between each term and the mean is squared, the formula for calculating variance puts particular weight on observations that lie far from the mean, or outliers, as the following table of student heights illustrates.
In this case, it represents the number of inches between the height of the individual and the mean. Both groups of students have a mean height of 70 inches. The heights of students in both groups also differ from the mean by the same number of total inches: By that measure of dispersion, the two distributions are identical.
However, the variance for Group 2 is higher because of the weight given in the variance formula to values that lie particularly far from the mean—Sahar and Narciso in this case. Variance is rarely used as a descriptive statistic on its own. Instead, the variance is most useful as a step toward calculating the standard deviation of a distribution, which is a more intuitive tool as a descriptive statistic. The standard deviation for a set of observations is the square root of the variance: For any set of n observations x1, x2, x3.
Both the perpetually drunk employees and the random missing pieces on the assembly line appear to have compromised the quality of the printers being produced there. Go figure!
And so it is with statistics. Although the field of statistics is rooted in mathematics, and mathematics is exact, the use of statistics to describe complex phenomena is not exact.
That leaves plenty of room for shading the truth. Mark Twain famously remarked that there are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.
Once there are multiple ways of describing the same thing e. Someone with nefarious motives can use perfectly good facts and figures to support entirely disputable or illegitimate conclusions.
Precision reflects the exactitude with which we can express something. Here is the problem: That answer may be entirely inaccurate if the gas station happens to be in the other direction. The gas station will be a couple hundred yards after that on the right.
Accuracy is a measure of whether a figure is broadly consistent with the truth—hence the danger of confusing precision with accuracy. If an answer is accurate, then more precision is usually better. But no amount of precision can make up for inaccuracy.
In fact, precision can mask inaccuracy by giving us a false sense of certainty, either inadvertently or quite deliberately. Joseph McCarthy, the Red-baiting senator from Wisconsin, reached the apogee of his reckless charges in when he alleged not only that the U.
State Department was infiltrated with communists, but that he had a list of their names. I learned the important distinction between precision and accuracy in a less malicious context. For Christmas one year my wife bought me a golf range finder to calculate distances on the course from my golf ball to the hole. This is an improvement upon the standard yardage markers, which give distances only to the center of the green and are therefore accurate but less precise.
With my Christmas-gift range finder I was able to know that I was I expected the precision of this nifty technology to improve my golf game. Instead, it got appreciably worse. There were two problems. First, I used the stupid device for three months before I realized that it was set to meters rather than to yards; every seemingly precise calculation The lesson for me, which applies to all statistical analysis, is that even the most precise measurements or calculations should be checked against common sense.
To take an example with more serious implications, many of the Wall Street risk management models prior to the financial crisis were quite precise. The problem was that the supersophisticated models were the equivalent of setting my range finder to meters rather than to yards. The math was complex and arcane. The answers it produced were reassuringly precise. But the assumptions about what might happen to global markets that were embedded in the models were just plain wrong, making the conclusions wholly inaccurate in ways that destabilized not only Wall Street but the entire global economy.
Even the most precise and accurate descriptive statistics can suffer from a more fundamental problem: a lack of clarity over what exactly we are trying to define, describe, or explain. Statistical arguments have much in common with bad marriages; the disputants often talk past one another.
Consider an important economic question: How healthy is American manufacturing? One often hears that American manufacturing jobs are being lost in huge numbers to China, India, and other low-wage countries. Which is it? This would appear to be a case in which sound analysis of good data could reconcile these competing narratives. The British news magazine the Economist reconciled the two seemingly contradictory views of American manufacturing with the following graph. In terms of output—the total value of goods produced and sold—the U.
The United States remains a manufacturing powerhouse. But the graph in the Economist has a second line, which is manufacturing employment. The number of manufacturing jobs in the United States has fallen steadily; roughly six million manufacturing jobs were lost in the last decade. Together, these two stories—rising manufacturing output and falling employment—tell the complete story.
Manufacturing in the United States has grown steadily more productive, meaning that factories are producing more output with fewer workers. This is good from a global competitiveness standpoint, for it makes American products more competitive with manufactured goods from low-wage countries. But there are a lot fewer manufacturing jobs , which is terrible news for the displaced workers who depended on those wages. In this case and many others , the most complete story comes from including both figures, as the Economist wisely chose to do in its graph.
Even when we agree on a single measure of success, say, student test scores, there is plenty of statistical wiggle room. Sixty percent of our schools had lower test scores this year than last year. Eighty percent of our students had higher test scores this year than last year.
The unit of analysis is the entity being compared or described by the statistics—school performance by one of them and student performance by the other. Thirty states had falling incomes last year. The thirty states with falling average incomes are likely to be much smaller: Vermont, North Dakota, Rhode Island, and so on. The key lesson is to pay attention to the unit of analysis.
Although the examples above are hypothetical, here is a crucial statistical question that is not: Is globalization making income inequality around the planet better or worse? By one interpretation, globalization has merely exacerbated existing income inequalities; richer countries in as measured by GDP per capita tended to grow faster between and than poorer countries.
Down with globalization! But hold on a moment. The same data can and should be interpreted entirely differently if one changes the unit of analysis. Both countries are huge with a population over a billion ; each was relatively poor in Not only have China and India grown rapidly over the past several decades, but they have done so in large part because of their increased economic integration with the rest of the world.
Given that our goal is to ameliorate human misery, it makes no sense to give China population 1. The unit of analysis should be people, not countries. What really happened between and is a lot like my fake school example above. Both companies provide cellular phone service.
One of the primary concerns of most cell phone users is the quality of the service in places where they are likely to make or receive phone calls. Thus, a logical point of comparison between the two firms is the size and quality of their networks. Since the population is not evenly distributed across the physical geography of the United States, the key to good cell service the campaign argued implicitly is having a network in place where callers actually live and work, not necessarily where they go camping.
As someone who spends a fair bit of time in rural New Hampshire, however, my sympathies are with Verizon on this one. Our old friends the mean and the median can also be used for nefarious ends. The mean of 3, 4, 5, 6, and is The median is the midpoint of the distribution; half of the observations lie above the median and half lie below. The median of 3, 4, 5, 6, and is 5. Now, the clever reader will see that there is a sizable difference between 24 and 5.
If, for some reason, I would like to describe this group of numbers in a way that makes it look big, I will focus on the mean. If I want to make it look smaller, I will cite the median. Consider the George W. Bush tax cuts, which were touted by the Bush administration as something good for most American families. But was that summary of the tax cut accurate? A relatively small number of extremely wealthy individuals were eligible for very large tax cuts; these big numbers skew the mean, making the average tax cut look bigger than what most Americans would likely receive.
The median is not sensitive to outliers, and, in this case, is probably a more accurate description of how the tax cuts affected the typical household. Of course, the median can also do its share of dissembling because it is not sensitive to outliers. Suppose that you have a potentially fatal illness. The good news is that a new drug has been developed that might be effective.
The doctor informs you that the new drug increases the median life expectancy among patients with your disease by two weeks. That is hardly encouraging news; the drug may not be worth the cost and unpleasantness.
Your insurance company refuses to pay for the treatment; it has a pretty good case on the basis of the median life expectancy figures. Yet the median may be a horribly misleading statistic in this case. Suppose that many patients do not respond to the new treatment but that some large number of patients, say 30 or 40 percent, are cured entirely. This success would not show up in the median though the mean life expectancy of those taking the drug would look very impressive.
In this case, the outliers—those who take the drug and live for a long time—would be highly relevant to your decision. Evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould was diagnosed with a form of cancer that had a median survival time of eight months; he died of a different and unrelated kind of cancer twenty years later. The definition of the median tells us that half the patients will live at least eight months—and possibly much, much longer than that.
In contrast, the mean is affected by dispersion. From the standpoint of accuracy, the median versus mean question revolves around whether the outliers in a distribution distort what is being described or are instead an important part of the message.
Once again, judgment trumps math. Of course, nothing says that you must choose the median or the mean. Bob is less likely to have stolen them, as he prefers candy. Mosley and the dog are unknowns, but either of them may have eaten the cookies. Or, Aunt may be lying. Apply logic. Map the scenarios. Assess and reassess the evidence. Eventually, a picture of the crime should emerge as you eliminate possibilities through logic. You may not get the correct answer, but you should be able to discover the most likely scenario.
A key piece of evidence, in this case, is the long hair found on top of the baking sheet. It is your only piece of physical evidence. The perpetrator must have had long hair. Uncle is bald, while Bob and Mosley have short hair. Aunt, Gina, and the dog all have long hair. With this in mind, your likely perpetrators are whittled down to three.
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Web Hosting. Free Options:. This easy-to-use platform will make it simple to recreate websites with built-in tools, however, there is no full publicly-facing option available. Some of the best opportunities for exploring brilliantly written, high quality literature are mysteries. Segmenting and blending individual sounds can be difficult at the beginning. Then put them into groups to share the facts they've collected, decide who Since I do a reading workshop in my classroom, the rest of the students are just reading independently while I am meeting with groups.
Managing Distress. I updated this ruleset in with some improvements. Using the problem chart can also begin after experiencing significant problems with inappropriate reactions in the classroom. Content areas range from money, telling time, place value and much more! Includes a free guest website with video game trailers and more. Forum; Groups; Blog; Contact; Stay connected The Mystery of Easter Island Imagine arriving on a small island in the Pacific Ocean about halfway between the island of Tahiti and the west coast of South America to find giant rock statues of human-like figures greeting you along the coastline.
Let me tell you we had the most fantastic time on Saturday at our Titanic Party. The teacher will then pass out one mystery box for each group. Get Started Today. Students can each be responsible for one part of the food web. Tikal by Elizabeth Mann. Word Detective End: If you are driving while doing this activity, end it as you get to your location or home.
Details A to Z Drama Games. Classroom Dynamics Every pupil and teacher brings with them into the classroom a diversity of skills, experiences, needs and expectations. In the next 90 minutes, well look at cryptosystems: Caesar cipher St. One of the most popular genres of literature for both adult and child readers is that of mystery and detective fiction.
I can honestly say it was the best party I have ever organized I just wanted to thank you for putting together such a splendid game and The Best Murder Mystery Game I have ever come across. Picture Talk Children who can segment and blend sounds easily are able to use this knowledge when reading and spelling. Lesson Objectives By the end of this lesson, students will: 1.
The game motivates students to ask 'Wh' questions and helps them learn interesting things about their classmates. More Mystery Pictures. These fun kids games can be played for individual enrichment or as part of a lesson plan. As police search the spa, they find 5 clues written down by witnesses. The show inspiring this lab is now available online via Alexandra Road. Send the Offer to Parents. The objective in cooperative learning games is for all members of the team to succeed.
An ever-popular review game that brings some healthy competition to the classroom. It has most of the stations you will need along with the student worksheet that they will use throughout the lab. When the game is played it is important that some form of group discussion takes place. We have not finished a test yet for The Thinking Toolbox. Answer Key: The Ellingtons collaborated to rob the bank, Miss murder mystery game.
The PowerPoint files listed here can be easily edited to reflect your own subject material. Let your kids think like detectives. This activity is for upper intermediate students who need to practice modal verbs. This exercise is designed for high school students.
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