ABSTRACT
Posing questions Before collecting any data, it is necessary to decide on the point of the enquiry, that is to formulate the questions. In school, ideally the questions would arise from the work the children were doing. Probably the best data handling activities arise from questions the children themselves pose. If at all possible the children should have some part in deciding what questions to investigate. The questions themselves can sometimes be framed in more challenging ways. For example, instead of ‘Find how many children in this class are born in each month of the year’, try several shorter questions such as ‘Which is the most common month for birthdays in this class?’ ‘Is it the same for boys and girls?’ ‘Do birthdays of brothers and sisters tend to fall in the same month?’ The nature and number of questions affect how the data should be collected and the way it is analysed. For the fi rst question above, it would be suffi cient to ask each child in the class the date of his or her birthday and simply record the month. For the second group of questions it is also necessary to record the child’s sex and the birthdays of his or her brothers and sisters.
