Unit 4D    Collecting and presenting information: questionnaires and pie charts

Databases form an important strand of the Scheme of work; they are met in Years 2,3,4 and 5. The emphasis of this unit should be on interpreting data and finding patterns in data rather than merely its collection and input.

Key objective Use a database program to draw pie charts and bar charts QCA Website
Revise database concepts. Load the program Information Workshop 2000 and load the file 'Survey'.

Revise the key database concepts which were taught in Year 3:

  • fields
  • records
  • sorting
  • searching
  • graphing
  • data input
 Survey (Information Workshop 2000)
Hypothesising and looking for patterns in data using the search and graphing tools. Formulate a question which can be tested from the given data, such as:

 "Are brown eyed people more likely to have brown hair than those people without brown eyes?"

or

"Are people born during the summer more likely to like salad than those born during the rest of the year.

Search for a subset of the whole group, e.g. all those with brown eyes...

...and graph their hair colour thus:

Compare this graph with that for the people whose eyes are not brown, i.e..

and

What conclusions can you draw? How accurate was the hypothesis?

Discuss the use of pie charts in Year 4 and how they may be the best way of showing proportions and fractions.

  
Building databases from scratch It is not a requirement of the QCA Scheme of Work that children should set up databases at Key Stage 2. Teachers, however, will need to be able to do this.

Experiment with the 'create a new file' option of Information Workshop 2000