Spreadsheet Practice

This is my example of the benefits of using Google Spreadsheets. This program is very similar to Excel spreadsheets but is extremely user friendly and can be accessed from any computer at any time. In fact, using formulas on spreadsheets becomes a virtual no-brainer with this program! You can simply click on formulas and view the hundred of options that are available.

The different sheets you can view illustrate the kind of graphing that can be done to show student score averages and can help a teacher easily pick out who is falling behind and who may have dropping scores. One chart shows the average test scores for the class. The other shows the average scores for each student.

The charts help illustrate the fact that the students overall improved their scores from the beginning tests to the later tests. However, there were some drops in test scores at various points. Some students started steady, dropped in scores for a couple of tests and then rallied their scores at the end. These drop in scores could be from plain old burnout or could mean that I need to change the way I prepared those students for those particular tests. This is the kind of helpful information that can be drawn from spreadsheets and the charts that in can produce.

Another feature illustrated in the spreadsheet is standard deviation. This allows you to look at the information beyond averages. It can show you how far scores may be from the average. In this set of information it allows me to see that many of the tests show similar deviation and most are not falling too far from the average.