Lesson video

Hello, welcome to lesson nine in this unit on "Local Fieldwork." I'm Miss Marl and I'm really excited to be teaching you today.

Today, we're going to look at how geographers present their data.

Let's get started.

Let's look at our agenda for today.

The lesson is going to be split into two parts.

In the first part, we'll looking at, why is data presentation important? In the second part, we'll look at how can I present my data? For this lesson, you will need an exercise book or some paper.

If you've got some squared paper that would be really handy for this lesson.

You will need a pencil, a ruler, and you'll also need the data you collected last time on the road use in your local community.

Why is data presentation important? The wonderful thing about collecting data is you end up with lots and lots of numbers or tally marks.

The difficulty with this is it's hard to see the story of the data.

So presenting the data in a way that everyone can see what the story of the data is, really helps.

Presenting the data helps a geographer see what the patterns are.

It also helps them to form conclusions.

You can see from this line graph that we can tell which is the highest amount and which is the lowest amount.

You can see the story, you can draw a conclusion.

We must remember to be really careful when presenting data.

Badly presented data can be really difficult to understand.

Our job as a geographer is to make this data, tell its story and make it easy to understand.

Here are three charts and graphs.

They've got labels, but the labels have gotten mixed up.

I'd like you to pause the video and sort out what the correct label should be for each graph or chart.

Resume the video when you're ready to find out the answers.

Did you work them out? Well done! The first one is a bar graph, the second one is a line graph and the third one is a pie chart.

Quite easy to remember the names of them.

The first one is made up of bars, the second one is a line and the third one looks a bit like a pie.

Now, we've got some descriptions for each of the graphs and charts, but again, they've got mixed up.

Your next task is to try and match the description to explain each type of graph or chart.

Pause the video to complete your task and resume once you're finished.

How did you get on? Did you work out that these are the answers? Let's have a little look at them now.

The first one, a bar graph.

It shows discrete, non-continuous data, which is data that is counting something, often in different categories.

For example, the responses to a survey.

So this one might be a survey of finding out what pets people have and you'd have a separate bar for cats and dogs and fish and snakes.

The second one, our line graph shows the relationship between two sets of data.

For example, this could be the price of houses in an area over time.

Often line graphs along the bottom axis does show a change in time.

The third one, the pie chart.

This one shows proportions.

The data has to be converted into percentages and then into proportions of 360 degrees, the number of degrees in a full circle.

For example, this could be the responses to a questionnaire question.

So it might be, what is your favourite flavour of ice cream? And it will show all the different flavours of ice cream that people have selected and the larger section of the pie, so in this part, the yellow section shows you their favourite flavour of ice cream and the least popular flavour of ice cream would be the red section because that's the smallest proportion of the pie chart.

Let's have a look now at how I can present my data.

First of all, step one, confirm you have your data.

Here's my data from last time, looking out of the window at the different types of transport I saw.

You can see that I've put the total numbers in here.

So it's really easy to see how many people, how many cars there were, how many bicycles, how many people were walking, how many buses and how many motorbikes? If you haven't got your data ready, go and get it now 'cause you're going to need it for this next part of the lesson and then press play when you're ready to start again.

Step two, draw your x and your y-axis.

Your x-axis is the line, the horizontal line along the bottom of the piece of paper.

And you can see on mine, I'm going to make it 10 centimetres wide, which is why a ruler is really important.

The vertical axis, the y-axis is also going to be 10 centimetres.

And again, I'm going to use my ruler and my pencil to present this data really neatly so it's clear for everyone who's looking at it.

Pause the video now while you create your x and y-axis, Well done.

Step three now, if you have a look at the horizontal axis at the bottom of your graph you can see that I have marked off small lines every two centimetres so that each of my bars or my bar graph are going to be the same width and each different mode of transport, I've put each one in a different section.

So you can see I've written car, bicycle, walking, bus, motorbike and importantly, I've put them in the gaps.

So I haven't written it under the little line that I've marked off, I've put it in the gaps because this is going to be the label for my bars that I'm going to create next.

Now it's your turn.

Pause the video, add in your markings of two centimetres along the x-axis at the bottom of your graph and label it with the modes of transport that you observed.

Well done.

Step four, you're going to label your y-axis.

This is the tricky bit.

So I've decided to label mine in one centimetre gaps.

You can see I've drawn little lines every one centimetres up the y-axis and I've labelled them with the numbers up to 10, because my highest number that I saw with the number of people walking and that was 10.

So I need to make sure that their scale covers the highest number of the data that I've collected.

So if you counted 20 cars, this graph wouldn't have a tall enough y-axis for you.

So you have two choices.

You can either make your y-axis taller to go tall enough for the number that you need, your highest number, mine was 10 or you can make the scale different.

So if I'd seen 20 cars, I could instead of counting in ones, my scale up the side could have counted in twos.

So this is the tricky bit.

You're going to have to work out what your y-axis should be so that you can mark off the data that you observed.

Pause the video and have a go with that tricky task.

Well done, that was the trickiest part.

Now we're going to plot the data, step five.

I've put my little total chart here at the side so that I can see it while I'm plotting my bars on my bar graph.

So the first one was three cars.

So you can see I've made my first bar, the one that has got the word car written at the bottom, go up to the y-axis where it says three.

And I've tried to make my lines really straight so that the bars are clear.

Really importantly, I've decided to make my bars touch and I've also tried really hard to make my bars the same width each.

Using square paper makes this so much easier, so if you've got square paper, definitely use that.

But already, my data is starting to tell a story.

We can see from this, the biggest number that I observed was the number of people walking, the smallest number that I observed, was the number of motorbikes I saw.

Pause your video.

It's now time for you to draw the bars on your bar graph using your data.

Resume the video when you're ready.

Step six, the last step.

We've got to add the titles and the labels so we know what our graph is showing.

Earlier on this lesson, our graphs didn't have any titles or any labels and it was really hard to tell what they were about.

So you can see at the top I've written a title.

A graph to show the different modes of transport used in my local community.

You counted the transport in your community, so you can copy this title because it's exactly the same for you.

If you were doing your own graph, you could still start your title with a graph to show, but you might want to change the ending.

So it might be, a graph to show my family's favourite ice cream flavours, a graph to show the different types of fruit that I have eaten in the last week.

So you can keep that beginning of your sentence, your title, and just change it to show the information that your graph is showing.

The other things that we need to do is at the bottom, the x-axis needs to be labelled with mode of transport, they're the types of transport that I observed.

And up the y-axis on the left, vertical axis, number of times observed.

The data word for this is the word frequency, you might want to use that instead.

And you can see that I've shaded each bar in a different colour just to make it even clearer for those people that are looking at this bar chart so that they can work out the story of the data too.

Now, it's time for you to pause the video and add your own title and your own labels.

Use the example on the screen to help you.

Press play when you're ready to resume.

Thank you so much for joining me today and all the hard work you've done and all the learning that you've completed.

Don't forget to fill in the exit quiz to find out how much you've remembered.

See you next time, bye.