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This Years projects 2018

Friday 14 September 2018

A run down on this year's ideas

I did this last year because I think that the more we hear about and share the 'ideas' behind internal assessments, the better we get at understanding the scope of possibility. At workshops I often challenge teachers to work with any given 'area of interest' and turn it in to a potential project so we can practice that process to help our students complete work on their own areas of interest. 


Reminders

Partly for my own benefit, I am trying to remind myself of some key parts of this process of taking ideas andmoulding them in to projects that meet the criteria. Here are a few....

  • I must show students lots of projects or at least talk them through the ideas. It is important for them to see a range, including some that are not heavily statistical. 
  • Try to help match the project with the student. If the student is targetting a top grade then the project must have potential to reach all the criteria. If they are targetting a 3 or a 4 then it might be ok to compromise on the potential a bit. Better that a student pursues their own area of interest and gets 12/20 ( a mark that supports their target) than is shoe horned in to something more complicated that they dont do very convincingly - especially if the latter then results in the same mark. The ofrmer would be a more positive experience.
  • Try and help students to have 'themes' for their projects rather than base it on a single specific process. The former tends to offer more potential.
  • Remember that searching for specific secondary data can difficult and disappointing. Often a search for useful secondary data on a given theme can give rise to an idea and that some students might do this in this order.
  • Note that many students cite this as the most enjoyable aspect of the course because of the choices they were allowed to make about what to do.

Some of this year's ideas

Here are a few of the projects I am going to be seeing this year

100 books to read before you die - This was the inspration and the student is going to be analysing data about those books to try and see what it takes to get on the list. Everything from good reads ratings, to publication date and sales figures are up for grans here.

La Liga - a football fan has a wealth of stats about a single La Liga (Spanish football league) season and will be looking for the patterns within it.

Teenage Pregnancy - Where is it most and least prevalaent? What are the possible causes/reasons? these kind of social indicators and always worth exploring and students tend to find out a lot by doing it.

Carbin emmissions - Very topical and I have already enjoyed what I have learned already. Which countries emit the most and what might explain that? What patterns emerge when looking at carbon emissions over time and what might explain that?

...