Portal:Letting the Numbers Talk
From Stepping Up
Data presentation is essential to attract interest and attention to your project. In this guide, we will be giving hints on how to do this in a number of ways. The key: visual graphics!
Sometimes, only one thing separates a science-fair project from excellence: the lack of simple statistical analysis. From the perspective of judges, good data analysis is important in science fair projects. Indeed, there is a 35 point section in the judging rubric that mentions "analysis of results using suitable graphs and statistics".
A Chi-Square (X2) statistics is used to investigate whether distributions of categorical data differ from one another. Basically, categorical variables provide data in categories. Responses to questions like "what is your favorite subject" or "do you own a car" are categorical, because yield answers such as "math" or "no". In contrast, responses to questions like "what is your weight" or "what is your GPA" is numerical.
| Data Type 1 | Data Type 2 | Total | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Category 1 | a | b | a + b |
| Category 2 | c | d | c + d |
| Total | a + c | b + d | a + b + c + d = N |
