Activity

Number of failing grades

Characters:

Florence Nightingale (The Lady of the Lamp)

Theme: Data organization and analysis

Competencies

Mathematical competence in science, technology and engineering

Personal, social and learning to learn competence

Competence in cultural awareness and expressions

Subjects and year by Educational System

Spain > Mathematics > 1st ESO > Stochastic sense

Spain > Mathematics > 1st ESO > Socio-affective sense

Enunciation

<img title="Women's Legacy logo" src="//inclusion.womenslegacyproject.eu/images/LogoWL.svg" /><hr />Florence Nightingale (1820-1910) is mostly known because of her work as a nurse during the Crimean War and her contribution to the reform in sanitary conditions at military hospitals. She is considered the mother of modern nursing and the creator of the first conceptual model of nursing. From a very young age she stood out in mathematics, and, later on, she applied her knowledge on statistics to epidemiology and to health statistics. She was the first woman to be admitted at the British Royal Statistical Society, and she was an honorary member of the American Statistical Association.
<img title="Polar area diagram devised by Florence Nightingale" src="//inclusion.womenslegacyproject.eu/uploads/resume/attachment/2656/Grafico_polar.jpg" alt="Polar area diagram devised by Florence Nightingale" width="200" height="184" />
Picture of a polar area diagram devised by Florence Nightingale.
We propose the following statistics problem:
The table below shows the number of subjects that a group of students has failed:
<table style="border-collapse: collapse; width: 15.2931%; border-style: solid;" border="1">
<tbody>
<tr>
<td style="width: 45.3344%; text-align: left;">Failing grades</td>
<td style="width: 54.7113%; text-align: center;">Absolute frequency</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td style="width: 45.3344%; text-align: center;">0</td>
<td style="width: 54.7113%; text-align: center;">6</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td style="width: 45.3344%; text-align: center;">1</td>
<td style="width: 54.7113%; text-align: center;">12</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td style="width: 45.3344%; text-align: center;">2</td>
<td style="width: 54.7113%; text-align: center;">10</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td style="width: 45.3344%; text-align: center;">3</td>
<td style="width: 54.7113%; text-align: center;">5</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td style="width: 45.3344%; text-align: center;">4</td>
<td style="width: 54.7113%; text-align: center;">3</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td style="width: 45.3344%; text-align: center;">5</td>
<td style="width: 54.7113%; text-align: center;">3</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td style="width: 45.3344%; text-align: center;">6</td>
<td style="width: 54.7113%; text-align: center;">1</td>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>
Please aswer the following questions:&nbsp;
a) &nbsp; &nbsp;How many students are there in the group?
a) &nbsp; &nbsp;What is the maximum number of subjects failed? And the minimum?
b) &nbsp; &nbsp;Calculate the relative frequencies and the percentages of each datum.
c) &nbsp; &nbsp;Draw the corresponding bar chart.

Observations and context

- Florence Nightingale is known for being a pioneer in modern medicine and for being a mathematician. She stood out in statistics, creating pie charts and applying descriptive statistics.

- She also worked as a writer, politician, and teacher.

- She was contemporary with other important female mathematicians: Ada Lovelace (1815-1852), pioneer in computer language; Mary Everest Boole (1832-1916), who studied mostly geometry; Sofya Kovalevskaya (1850-1891), devoted to mathematical analysis and differential equations; Charlotte Angas Scott (1858-1931), who worked on algebra and geometry and fought for the inclusion of women in universities; Mary Somerville (1780-1872), considered to be "the queen of 19th century science"; and Maria Mitchell (1818-1889), first woman to be a professional astronomer in the United States.

- She was an inspiration to other women that worked on statistics and probability later on, like Hilda Geiringer (1893-1973) and Maria Goeppert-Mayer (1906-1972).

- Nightingale's work is also an important link in the study of English feminism. In some of her essays, like Cassandra, she complains about how women were considered incompetent, and she demands a better education for them and the possibility to apply this education.

Description

In this activity we will work on the basis of descriptive statistics (frequency tables and bar charts) through an example of discrete variables.

Number of failing grades

Enunciation

Observations and context

Description

Answer

Documents