Unit 7: Culminating Data Management Investigation / Final Exam

In this section you will be assigned two Critique Partners. You will have two tasks:

• to ask your critique partners questions about their project.
• to respond to questions from your critique partners about your project.

1. Provide each of your critique partners with a copy of your abstract and have your written report available.
2. Read the abstracts and review your informal critique of the projects of your two critique partners.
3. During the first half of the class, meet with your first critique partner. Ask your critique partner two relevant questions about their project. You will likely ask them about the appropriateness of the models that they chose or the data analysis methods they used, the validity of their conclusions, the trustworthiness of their sources of data, the assumptions that they made, and the conclusions that they made.
4. Summarize their responses. Ask at least one further question of your critique partner and summarize their response.
5. You will not have time to do this during the Question and Answer session but you will need to complete a formal critique for your first critique partner's project. See Step (8).
6. After summarizing the response of your critique partner to your questions, answer two relevant questions about your report and respond to your first critique partner's questions during this Question and Answer period.
7. During the second half of Question and Answer Session, repeat this process of asking questions, summarizing your second critique partner's responses and answering their questions about your project.
8. Complete formal critiques for each project by addressing the following components:
   • Discuss the appropriateness of their data collection method (respondents of surveys were randomly selected using an approved method, source of their data is reliable, etc.);
   • Discuss the effectiveness of their graphical and numerical displays of their data (titles and axes are clearly labeled, scales are appropriate, variables that are compared are relevant, etc.);
   • Discuss their use of summary statistics (measures of central tendency, of spread, confidence intervals, margin of error, percentiles, z-scores, correlation coefficients, etc.);
   • Discuss the appropriateness of the models they propose (uniform, exponential, Normal, linear or non-linear regression, etc.);
   • Discuss the validity of their conclusions (cause-and-effect relationships, differences in populations, does their data support their claims?, etc.);
   • Be sure to identify at least two strengths, one weakness and/or one next step that they could pursue if they had more time to address these issues.