Visual Data

  I used Microsoft Word to create a visual representation of 100 third grade students’ beginning of the year math pre-test scores versus their beginning of the year writing pre-test scores. I did not know that you could create graphs in Word, but it is a very easy program to use and makes many different kinds of charts and graphs.

On my graphs, the X-axis represents a student’s score on the beginning of the year math test. The highest possible score is a 100.

The Y-axis represents a student’s score on the beginning of the year writing sample. The highest possible score is a 24.

Every diamond is a student in third grade at my school.

Sometimes we unintentionally place kids in boxes. (These are high kids across the board: these are low kids across the board.)

We expect our students’ test scores to look like this:

This is what my third grade students’ test scores actually look like:

I wanted to see if students who are high in math might not necessarily be high in writing and visa versa. The range is much wider than we believe it to be. There are students who scored at an 85% on the math, but only got a 12 on the writing. There are also students who scored 19 on the writing, but only 24% on the math.

I think that the scatterplot below does a great job of showing that the coloration between math test scores and writing test scores is not as close as we sometimes believe it to be. It is also easy to see the outliers in the data: students who scored very high or very low on one of the tests.