statistics project ideas high school

statistics project ideas high school

Engaging Statistics Project Ideas for High School Students

1. Introduction to Statistics Projects

By the time students reach high school, they have learned about many of the key concepts of statistics. While probability is typically learned in middle school, there are always some great new activities that help to prove it. This makes high school the perfect time to introduce students to more in-depth statistics, including hypothesis testing. One way to do this is to engage students in statistics projects. Statistics projects encourage students to develop important intellectual and organizational skills, including formulating original questions about a real issue, conducting independent research, and communicating their findings. The writing skills also play an important role in this process. Finally, statistics projects require students to make decisions and defend them in written form. This paper describes seven statistics projects assigned to high school students taking first-year statistics for the first time.

2. Descriptive Statistics Projects

Project 2 – You will collect age, gender, hours of video games played, hours of television watched, and hours of sports played by your male friends, female friends, and family members. (Hint: You may need a three-way table.) After organizing your data, conduct a descriptive analysis of each question. Choose a research question that you believe can be explored using this data. (You can also use a research question as your guiding format if you would rather work on making that more specific.) Create a summary of the results, including figures and at least four tables. Use a written summary to briefly explain what he or she found and what other research questions could be answered using this data.

Project 1 – Collect data from your school on the income of students’ parents. Your variables will be the income and grade level of the student. Average the income for each grade level. Perform a regression analysis to determine if the relationship is significant. The null hypothesis is that there is no relationship. To test for significance, set alpha to 0.01. (Hint: Use a statistical package to perform the tests.) Present your analysis in a small typed or written summary.

3. Inferential Statistics Projects

4. Teens and Social Media Pew Research has up-to-date data related to teens and social media. Ask one of the Social Studies teachers if you can distribute the survey in their classes. You can ask the school office for contact information for the parents, but be aware that some schools may not be willing to give this information out. Finally, ask the Social Studies teachers if they will help distribute and collect the surveys.

3. Conduct a Survey and Report the Results Formulate a research question (such as “Do females study longer than males?”) and conduct a survey. Develop the research design including both operational definitions and the corresponding data collection sheet. Analyze the results to draw conclusions and make recommendations.

2. Student Loan Debt Student loan debt is a topic that has received a lot of attention recently – student loan debt surpassed credit card debt in 2010 and has been growing ever since. Your project is to compare the average student debt at graduation for different demographic groups – e.g. males vs females, white vs black, etc. You may be able to find data from the college/university or online. Alternatively, this data is publicly available.

1. Female-Male Salary Differentials You might like to pursue this project with a small group. There are several data sources available to find information about the average salary for certain groups of workers. Your project is to calculate the average salary for males and females in the same job and determine whether women are earning significantly less than males. You may also be able to find out more information about workers, such as education, years of experience, and number of hours worked. An analysis of the relationships between salary, gender, and other potential control variables should be made.

4. Data Visualization Projects

Use a public source to get data on total GDP and the population of each country from Almond, Douglas, and Kevin O’Brien. Compute GDP per capita and investigate the impact of oil prices on GDP growth per capita in an oil-rich country using ggplot2.

7. Oil Prices and GDP Growth Per Capita

Choose an inspiring and insightful article featuring data visualization and prepare a presentation; or team up with classmates to create programs to generate various types of data visualization such as pie/causes of grade distributions using matplotlib or seaborn.

6. Data Visualization Basics

This project starts with data collection and simple data cleaning using Excel and involves intermediate Excel skills and exploratory data visualization of market segments using quadrant plots. It’s a great end-of-year project for students!

5. Price Stability and Competition in Market Quadrants

This project serves as a good example of data collection, simple data cleaning, and data visualization with analysis using visual findings. It demonstrates the power of data visualization in informing policy discussions.

4. Homelessness and Minimum Wage

Get GDELT historical event counts for a country and visualize the dynamic development of event counts to illustrate seasonal variations or unique country event patterns.

3. Animated Bar Plots with GDELT

Wonder where electronics come from and who they are made by? Use Violent Trade Consumption Network Analysis and visualization to understand the link between entertainment and modern slavery.

2. Entertainment and Modern Slavery

Get time series information on Google Doodles from Google and visualize the diversity of honorees and occasions celebrated through animated bar plots.

1. Diversity in Google Doodles

Subject Area: Open

Here is a set of data visualization projects suitable for high school students. For a comprehensive introduction to teaching data visualization to young learners, refer to this Data Visualization syllabus aimed at older school children.

5. Conclusion and Future Directions

Formal statistics and data science classes are relatively young in the K-12 curriculum. With the advent of the Common Core State Standards, students are being first exposed to statistical topics in the younger grades. At the upper high school level or undergraduate level, students may not only be getting exposed to statistics for the purpose of creating a more informed citizenry, but they may also be required to obtain a deeper understanding of statistics in college. This dichotomy of being familiar with statistics for statistical literacy reasons and needing to know more statistics in order to prepare for college creates a specific challenge. Short of offering two separate statistics courses, what are teachers to do to expose the students to more sophisticated projects and expose some students to college board level statistics while others remain interested and engaged?