Developing skills for the Extended Project Qualification

Activity 7: Presenting the data

Teacher notes

Learning Outcome: you will be able to use appropriate and effective ways of summarising and displaying data

In this activity you will consider some different ways of displaying data.

Student activity / Teacher Notes
The context for this activity comes from the project idea of Food Waste, on the IntoBiology website / This context is chosen because the data from survey responses may be more unfamiliar to science students than quantitative data.

To read:

Many consumers do not recognise that packaging protects food in the home. While there is recognition that packaging is important to keep the product safe on its way to and in the store, there is less recognition that it plays a role at home. In fact, the prevailing view is the opposite, i.e. that keeping products in the packaging leads them to spoil more quickly. This in turn leads many consumers to adopt unpacking strategies that potentially decrease the longevity of products (i.e. taking products out of their packaging or piercing the packaging to ‘let it breathe’).

These findings are consistent with previous WRAP research, both in terms of in-home behaviour and the potential reduction in product life resulting from this. This finding is also important because, among the minority of consumers who do recognise that packaging can keep products fresher for longer, attitudes to packaging are significantly less negative.

The top three benefits that consumers identify about packaging are that it ‘keeps products safe and hygienic’ (42% mentioning); that it ‘provides important information on labels’ (37%); and, that it ‘protects the food (from the factory to the shop and on the way home)’ (36%). In comparison, just 13% feel it has a role in protecting food in the home.

However, when asked to identify their top three positive or negative associations with packaging, the two most frequent responses are negative: ‘uses too much material’ (52%) and ‘bad for the environment’ (50%). On balance, consumers give 1.4 positive answers out of three compared to 1.6 negative answers. They are far less likely to acknowledge that it ‘extends the life of the product’ (22%).

Acknowledgement of this aspect, however, appears to engender more positive associations with packaging. For example, among those consumers who do acknowledge that packaging extends the life of the product, the balance of responses is notably different - 2.5 positive answers out of three (and just 0.5 negative answers). However, this group of consumers are currently in a minority and the prevailing view is actually the reverse - almost two in thee (62%) agree with the statement ‘keeping fruit and vegetables in their packaging makes them sweat and go off quicker’.

Plumb, A., Downing, P. and Parry, A. (2013), Consumer Attitudes to Food Waste and Food Packaging Oxford: WRAP.

Student activity / Teacher Notes
To do:
1)In your group, discuss how the data summarised here would have been collected.
2)In your group, discuss how best to show the data for consumer’s attitudes to packaging visually. Make a sketch of any graph or chart that would summarise the data effectively.
3)Swap you ideas with another group. Make constructive comments on how the other group’s sketched ideas could be improved, with reasons. Feed this back to the other group.
4)In your pair, follow the link to the ‘Step by step protocols’ from the Food Waste project page. Choose 2 of the suggested ‘Areas for investigation’. Sketch the table you could use for collecting the data and the graph or chart that would most effectively summarise the data. You may need to read down to the descriptions of the tests to see what measurements you could make.
5)Join up with another pair of students to share your reasons for your table and chart/ graph design. Give each other some feedback on how to improve the presentation of your data. / This is survey data, where different answer options were provided for each question.
It may be best to show a bar chart for each question separately – with a bar labelled for each response, showing the % of people who gave that response.
It is likely that any graph or chart will show averages of repetitions rather than all the raw data collected in the table.
Students should consider the units when making tables and labelling axes in their sketched graphs.
Applying your learning
1)Write a project title that is as close as possible to the ideas you currently have for you EPQ project. Make a note on the type of data that you might collect. Sketch a suitable table for collecting the data, and one or more ideas for how you might summarise the findings visually. You could show this to another student or your teacher for feedback. / Thinking about the data collection and presentation ahead of starting the project helps to focus the research question and methods.

Science & Plants for Schools: Activity 7 – teacher notes: p. 1