Polling Lessons

  Yesterday, I supplied a brief introduction to error margin and the math associated with polls, specifically political polls. Today we'll look at a couple of lessons on the topic.

First stop,  a lovely lesson from the New York Times on evaluating polling methods and results.  Its a lesson that deals with the results of a poll on texting and driving.

The lesson begins with the teacher asking the students the same questions found in the poll before tabulating the results of the class. Once these results are in, the teacher then shares the results of the official poll.


Students are then quizzed about their experience taking polls. As a final step, the class reads the article associated with the poll results before answering six questions associated with the reading.  What is nice is that the poll results also includes information on how the poll was done.

PBS New Hour has a nice lesson plan on the pitfalls of polling.  The lesson begins with a short video called the poll dance which introduces them to the concept of the validity of polls.  There is a hand out to fill out as the video is played.  It is suggested students watch the video the first time and fill out the handout, the second time through.

The second handout sends students to a website filled with polls for the students to look at one poll in detail, looking at things like things like the title and if the title relates to the poll itself, who conducted it, does it have a bias, how was the sample selected, sample size, etc so the the student has a chance to really examine the poll in detail.

The final activity divides students up into four groups, each group will examine an election from 1844, 1896, 1912, and 1926 to see how the predictions matched up with the election.  All though it students are requested to apply the information from the video to the activities.

The Civics Channel  has a lesson on the mathematics of polling where they go into detail on the 95% confidence level, diminishing returns, and errors in poll taking.  In addition, this is the first in a series of  activities on polling.  The next one has students applying the 5 W's of writing to the poll to find out more about who commissioned it, why did they, etc to make the student more aware of the motive behind the poll.  The third lesson looks at how a professional polling company works by looking at the methodology, the questions, and the report generated from a specific job.  This company is from Canada but much of the information is the same.

So if you want to look at polling in specific, check these lessons out.  Have a great day and let me know what you think, I'd love to hear.