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Finding Facts
You may find it difficult to answer some of your friend's
questions.
It is not easy to find people's opinions. It is easier to find
facts.
Asking the Questions
Here is a questionnaire to find facts about your class.
Class Facts
- Sex?
- Height?
- Hair colour?
- How many sweets do you eat?
- Mother's age at birth?
|
| a |
Answer these five questions as
well as you can. |
Collecting the Answers
To help us collect the class answers, we use tables. These
help us to count the number of pupils giving different answers.
When completed, they give us a summary.
Table 1 is a blank table for the answers to question 1. An
example of how it is completed is shown in Table 2.
| Sex |
Tally |
No. of pupils |
| Male |
|
|
| Female |
|
|
| |
Total |
|
Table 1 - Boys and girls in our class (blank
table).
| Sex |
Tally |
No. of pupils |
| Male |
  |
13 |
| Female |
|
15 |
| |
Total |
28 |
Table 2 - Boys and girls in our class
(completed).
| a |
Prepare blank tables for
questions 2 to 5 of B1 (Class Facts). |
Recording the Answers
It takes a long time to record answers from all the class.
Work in a group of about six pupils to speed things up.
| a |
Take each of the six answer
sheets to B1 in turn.
Pass them round and complete your blank tables.
Record each answer once only. |
Some answers will give trouble. Some questions are not clear.
Your table may not be good enough.
| b |
Did you have to amend any of
your tables? |
| c |
If so was this because you
forgot something or was it because there was something
wrong with the question? |
| d |
Which questions gave the most
difficulty? |
Improving the Questions
Even finding facts is not easy. The questionnaire you answered
was very badly prepared. The main error in questions on
questionnaires is that they are TOO VAGUE. People do not know
what answer to give. These can lead to the following PROBLEMS.
- Different units of measurement are in the answers.
- Some possible answers are not in the summary table.
- The same answers have different names (e.g. hair colour -
light, fair, blonde) and someone has to sort these out.
- There is a mixture of two or more different types of
answers.
One of the questions in Class Facts was 'Height?'. This is
vague. You don't know whether to give the answer in metres and
centimetres or feet and inches. This means that you may have
Problem 1. You do not know whether to keep your shoes on or not.
This means you may have Problem 4, some give height in bare feet,
while others give it in shoes. Changing the question to 'Height
to nearest centimetre in bare feet?' removes these problems.
The next question was 'Hair colour?'.
| a |
Why is this vague? |
| b |
Which of the four problems is
caused? |
| c |
Change the question to remove
the problem. |
Look at questions 4 and 5 of Class Facts.
| |
d |
How are they vague? |
| |
e |
Which problems do they cause? |
| |
f |
Change the questions to remove
these problems. |
| * |
g |
Draw up new summary tables to
use with your improved questionnaire. |
| |
h |
Write down three more questions
to find out facts about your class. Make sure they are
not vague. |
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