Using historical census data

[bfrisch@friendsseminary.org]

Dear Friends,

I want to mention a project that I do each year in my Statistics for Social Justice class. I originally did it in Fathom, but I have been doing with R in recent years. I notice that there is access to IPUMs data again using CODAP.

I have my students read portions of “The Warmth of Other Suns” by Isabel Wilkerson. Then student teams sample census data for NYC, Chicago and LA for years 1900-1980 recording birthplace general, race and other socio-economic variables of their choosing. The students use their samples to estimate the size of the Great Migration to their city and they compare measures of success for migrants vs. non-migrants. Students report their results using confidence intervals for their migration estimates and do some inference on their comparison variables of choice.

I was inspired by Fathom’s built in sampler, but I have learned how to teach students how to navigate IPUMs directly since Fathom’s demise. I will look at what is available via CODAP this summer to see if I can use the plug in.

Thank you so much for being an important inspiration to my teaching over the past two decades. I am particularly grateful for the encouragement to get students performing their own simulations and resampling for inference.

Ben Frisch, Math Department, Friends Seminary K-12 school

[Dan Damelin]

Let us know if you have questions about the sampler and it’s function to do the kind of work you are interested in. We are also going to be releasing a plugin soon called Testimate, which will make inferential statistical calculations more possible with CODAP as well.

[Heather Barker]

Ben

Thank you for sharing. That’s so great that you’re getting to teach a Statistics for Social Justice at high school. I teach for a private university, and have made it part of my teaching to include social justice topics as well. This semester I’m teaching an introductory statistics course where we’re focusing on the intersection and race in education, through history and through today. We’re particularly focusing on the increase in integration of schools from Brown v Board to about 2000, then the gradual resegregation that is currently occuring in schools.

I spent time as a Tinker Fellow at Concord in 2022. During that time we created a portal that is available to access a dataset called Fatal Encounters. This is a data set of over 30,000 people from 2000 to 2021 who died in a fatal encounter with police. This dataset is not just people killed in direct confrontations or arrests, but also people who may have died in a car wreck caused by a high speed chase, and even officers who may have ended their own lives. Here is the link to the portal: https://concord-consortium.github.io/codap-data-interactives/build/  The portal allows students to choose people by state and/or year. I’m attaching a short lesson I did with this dataset.

If you ever need any help with the sampler I’d be glad to help as well.

Attachments:

1. Fatal-Encounters-Data-Investigation.docx

[Bill Finzer]

And here is a link to a CODAP document that contains the Fatal Encounters plugin (in case it wasn’t clear how to get to it).

• This reply was modified 2 months ago by Bill Finzer.

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