Displaying data
Tips for teaching maths skills to our future chemists, by Paul Yates of Keele University
Information is redundant if not shared, so being able to communicate numerical data is important. Additionally students need to be able to express their experimental data in an appropriate way for assessment purposes, and so they must be able to organise data in a meaningful way.1 Generally, data are displayed using tabular or graphical techniques, or both.
What difficulties do students have?
I find that students are better at interpreting, rather than constructing, graphs.2 Many are reluctant to tabulate data, preferring lengthy repetitive text which is occasionally punctuated by the quantities they want to report. When it comes to drawing graphs, some students have problems choosing the right scale and the origin, and units pose problems whether they are displaying their data in a table or on a graph.
How is this best taught?
Research distinguishes between qualitative (interpreting trends) and quantitative (reading values) activities, and stresses the importance of encouraging students to construct graphs.2
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