1. Let’s Start With Some Basics:Displaying Information Mark McGinley BIOL 5311 Summer 2011

2. Back To Our Original Question Are there more girls or boys in a classroom? Our data 10 boys and 15 girls

3. How Can We Display This Information? Explain in a sentence- Because there were 10 boys and 15 girls there were more girls in the classroom. This is correct and accurate, but maybe not the easiest way to display the information.

4. Bat Example If we wanted to know which species was most abundant at Krau Wildlife Reserve and there were 25 species of animals then we would have to write- Because there were 25 monkeys, 35 squirrels, 13 2 tigers, 240 fruit bats, 6 hornbills, 9 pheasants, 4 elephants, 9 tapirs, 13 guar, 5 rhinos, 16 …………. You see how this gets to be messy!!

5. Important Point It is important that scientists/teachers/students are able to express their answer in words. What we would like to be able to do is to display information in a way that makes it easy to translate back and forth from display to words and from words to display.

6. Table It is often useful to display numeric values in a table Example sex of students male female Number 10 15

7. Let’s Interpret This Table Information held in this table. there were 10 boys in the classroom there were 15 girls in the classroom What can we figure out from looking at this table? There were a total of 25 students in the classroom There were more girls than boys in the classroom 2/5th of the students were male 60% of the students were female There were 5 more girls than boys in the classroom There were 1.5 times more girls than boys in the classroom.

8. Some Advantages of Tables Able to give exact values We can sometimes use the exact values to determine additional information E.g. we could use this info to figure out how many students were in the class 10 male students + 15 female students = 25 students Most people are comfortable with numbers Can display a lot of information in a relatively small space

9. Example Of Lots of Info in a Slide Not necessarily easy to look at, but the information is there if you need it.

10. Possible Weaknesses With Tables Have to study the numeric values The information doesn’t jump off of the page in visual form

11. Graphs: A Quick, Brief Intro Displaying information in graphs can allow us to visually examine the information Types of Graphs Bar graphs Line graphs Pie Charts Area Graphs X-Y plots

12. Which Type of Graph to Choose? Which type of graph you should choose depends On the type of information you collected What you intend your audience to learn from looking at the graph Your audience For example, I would rarely use a Pie Chart in a presentation to a group of scientists but I might use Pie Charts for a more general audience

13. Let’s Try to Answer Our QuestionBar Graph Number of Students

14. Area Graphs Number of Students

15. Pie Chart

16. Time For You To Discuss Write out and discuss all of the information that is held in each of the graphs.

17. Time For You to Discuss What are the pros and cons of each way of displaying data Table Bar graph Area graph Pie chart Why does it make no sense to take use line graph or scatterplot to display this information?

18. Some Graph Resources (any other good resources??) Graphing Tutorial http://nces.ed.gov/nceskids/help/user_guide/graph/whentouse.asp Choosing an appropriate graph http://www.nutshellmath.com/textbooks_glossary_demos/demos_content/elem_choosing_an_appropriate_graph.html