A Mathematical Class Portrait
from 11/8/2001 to 1/15/2002

by

Sonia Andujar, Geucimar Aquino, Ellen Castro, Prazeres Coelho, Jean Desane, Mario 
F, Meshelle Griffith, Antoine Hill, Lillian Jones, Mei Li, F M, Laura Miola, Jose Moscat, T 
P, Maria Elena Pedraza, Clara Preciado, Concepcion Preciado, Coral Rawlins, Joseph 
Rogers, Tracy Romain, Milca Santos, Amilton Semedo et al


Introduction

We, the students of the Community Learning Center’s Bridge Program, who have a GED or high school diploma, wanted to improve our skills before entering college next year. The data we present in this report compare our computer skills from November to January. 


Design of the Project

On the first class on November 8, 2001, our math/computer teacher asked us about twenty questions concerning our backgrounds and our current computer skills. We answered all the questions and recorded them on a large chart as a part of the game. 

By mid-January, we had attended 15 hours of computer lab and had worked 
on many exercises, including opening e-mail accounts, writing our state legislators, and visiting several Web sites. As our Excel spreadsheet project, we took the answers from the game we had played in November, entered them into a spreadsheet, and learned how to make graphics from the data. When we analyzed our first graphs, we found that the results were not very exciting. We decided to concentrate on seven questions and to see how the answers had changed between November and January.

The questions we chose were:
  1. Have you used the Internet to look up information?
  2. Do you have an e-mail account?
  3. Do you know what your favorite operating system is?
  4. Have you used Word?
  5. Have you used Excel?
  6. Do you have your own Web site?
  7. Do you know what you want to major in when you go to college next year?
By this time, some students had dropped out of the Bridge Program and others had 
been added, so we decided to gather fresh data and record it directly onto an Excel 
spreadsheet. One student designed the data form while several others worked on the group essay.

Once we collected new data from everyone who attended that night, we copied the data file to each of our diskettes, produced bar graphs, and computed the percent of increase for each of the seven questions.


Results

The above graph shows responses to seven questions.  The first bar in each pair of bars represents the students' responses as of November 8, 2001; the second, the responses as of January 19, 2002.

Summary of Student Responses to Computer Skills Questions

DATE  SKILL/QUESTION # STUDENTS # GAIN % INCREASE
11-8-01 use Internet 18    
1-15-02 use Internet 19 1 6%
11-8-01 has e-mail 13    
1-15-02 has e-mail 17 4 31%
11-8-01 know operating system 8    
1-15-02 know operating system 11 3 38%
11-8-01 use Word 15    
1-15-02 use Word 20 5 33%
11-8-01 use Excel 8    
1-15-02 use Excel 16 8 100%
11-8-01 have Website 1    
1-15-02 have Website 2 1 100%
11-8-01 know major 8    
1-15-02 know major 8 0 0%


As you can see from the above table and graph, our computer skills did improve 
significantly.

Although our class showed a 100% increase in both our Excel and web design skills, we think it is important to note that increasing from one to two and from eight to sixteen both produce a 100% increase. This illustrates a shortcoming with percentages. 
If you contrast this with the 33% improvement in our Word skills, it looks as though we learned more about web design than we did about word processing. However, the reality of the situation is that more students learned Word than any other computer skill.

Conclusion

This project proved to be an efficient way to develop our math, computer, and writing skills.


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