The Domesday Project
Take a look at these data collected by children in 1986 as part of the Domesday Project. What do they tell you? What do you think about the way they are presented?
Problem
For accessibility: The first graph is a bar chart with the letters a to p on the x-axis and the numbers 1 to 18 on the y-axis. The letters represent the types of pets owned by the students, with a being cats; b dogs; c guinea pigs; d horses; e fish; f rabbits; g chickens; h sheep; i hamsters; j budgies; k ducks; l goats; m pigs; n birds; o bantams; and p gerbils. The numbers recorded from a to p are 12, 18, 2, 6, 11, 4, 5, 1, 2, 2, 1, 2, 1, 3, 1, 1.
Above are two sets of data that were gathered by school children in 1986 for what was called the Domesday Project. This project took place throughout the U.K. celebrating 900 years since the Domesday Book. You can find out more about it here.
In the data you see what two schools found out about the pets owned by some of the children. The Domesday Project took place in the early days of computers and so there were not many ways to display the information.
Here is a collection of seven such surveys which you can download as a pdf (data.pdf). These seven include the two above. Have a good look at them. You could focus on just the two above or on all seven.
What did the various school children find out?
These seven schools were all from very different areas of the UK. Does that surprise you? How might that have affected the data?
What differences do you notice in the ways that the data is displayed?
Which survey do you think is presented in the best way? Why?
Which survey do you think is not presented in a helpful way? Why?
You could do a similar survey in your class and compare the results.
Getting Started
Are there any sets of data that are similar? Why might that be?
Are there any sets of data that seem very different? Why might that be?
Which set of data do you think is the easiest to understand? Why?
Which set of data do you think is the most difficult to understand? Why?
Student Solutions
The students from Luton Junior School sent us a very thorough analysis of the data:
What did the various school children find out?
We looked at all 7 sets of data and wrote down what we could see from the information. Here are our findings:
Survey 1
Dogs were the most popular on this chart. We noticed that the top three pets in this chart are dogs, cats and fish. The information showed that there were quite a few farm animals (such as pigs, ducks, bantams, sheep, horses, chickens and goats!) so we think that the place this data was collected is near a farm or the country side.
Survey 2
We found that the most popular animal was pigeons (we thought that it was quite strange to keep pigeons). The top three animals were doves, pigeons and fish. There were some animals like goats and heifers which made us think of a farm but the pigeons and doves made us think it might be a city.
Survey 3
Fish were the most popular pets on survey 3. There were 16 more than cats which came 2nd.
The top three pets were fish with 57, cats with 41 and dogs with 39 in that order.
The least popular pet was a horse. Since the horse was the only large animal we thought the owner might have to travel to get to it.
Survey 4
We decided to look at the information in the 'total pets' column because the data was really different between class 5 and class 6.
There were 40 fish which were the most popular kind of pet, it beat dogs with 27 and cats with 26. The top 3 pets were fish with 40, dogs with 27 and cats with 26.
Like the last set of data, there was a horse as a pet. This was also the only large pet in this survey so maybe this school was in a town and not in the country.
Survey 5
We looked at the information which showed us that cats were the most popular (36). We also found out that the cats, dogs and fish were the tops three pets. Horses were the least popular (2) and all the other pets were small animals. So we thought this school could have been in a similar type of place to Survey 3 and Survey 4.
Survey 6
- Dogs were the most popular.
- The top 3 pets were dogs, fish and cats.
- All the other pets were small animals.
Survey 7
We could not understand this set of data. There was no key and the numbers did not seem to match up with the # symbol in any way.
These seven schools were all from very different areas of the UK. Does that surprise you? How might that have affected the data?
We can see that the data in survey 2 might have been from somewhere different but the others had a lot of things in common. Survey 1 and survey 2 were the only ones to have farm animals as pets so we think these schools must be in the countryside.
We also noticed that the top 3 animals in nearly all the surveys (apart from survey 2) were fish, cats and dogs. We decided that this might be because these animals are easy to care for and it does not matter where you live if you want to keep them.
We looked on the internet and found that people keep pigeons so they can race them. We thought this was not helpful in trying to work out where they were from because you only need a place to keep them about the size of a shed.
What differences do you notice in the ways that the data is displayed?
We noticed the data was mostly shown as types of bar charts. Some showed the data going up and some showed it going along. Some used a code for the type of pets but others labelled the bar. The schools had used a symbol to show the pets.
We could not understand the data in survey 7. We also thought that survey 3 was a bit confusing because the height of the 'bars' did not tell you the number of pets. We thought the data in survey 1 was all too close together and we needed to use a ruler to hold against the bars. The data in survey 2 needed a scale or a key - we guessed that each star was worth 1. Finally, we thought that survey 4 had too much information in it and we weren't sure which data to use.
Which survey do you think is presented in the best way? Why?
We liked survey 5 best because it was the easiest to understand. It was clear that * = 1 pet and the data was spaced out making it easy to see.
Which survey do you think is not presented in a helpful way? Why?
Survey 7 was not presented well because we did not know what the numbers in the brackets meant. The only information we could get was the types of pets. We could not even guess the numbers because the line of #### did not match the numbers in the brackets.
Thank you Luton Junior School, you've presented your analysis to us very clearly. In some parts of the north of England pigeons and doves are kept as pets in pigeon lofts and sometimes trained to race in competitions. Why not find out some more about this?
Teachers' Resources
The Domesday Project
Above are two sets of data that were gathered by school children in 1986 for what was called the Domesday Project. This project took place throughout the U.K. celebrating 900 years since the Domesday Book. You can find out more about it here.
In the data you see what two schools found out about the pets owned by some of the children. The Domesday Project took place in the early days of computers and so there were not many ways to display the information.
Here is a collection of seven such surveys which you can download as a pdf (data.pdf). These seven include the two above. Have a good look at them. You could focus on just the two above or on all seven.
What did the various school children find out?
These seven schools were all from very different areas of the UK. Does that surprise you? How might that have affected the data?
What differences do you notice in the ways that the data is displayed?
Which survey do you think is presented in the best way? Why?
Which survey do you think is not presented in a helpful way? Why?
You could do a similar survey in your class and compare the results.