World Population Activity II: Excel
This activity has been accepted by a Panel Peer Review.
HideThis resource received an Accept or Accept with minor revisions rating from a Panel Peer Review process
These materials were reviewed using face-to-face NSF-style review panel of geoscience and geoscience education experts to review groups of resources addressing a single theme. Panelists wrote reviews that addressed the criteria:
- scientific accuracy and currency
- usability and
- pedagogical effectiveness
- Accept
- Accept with minor revisions
- Accept with major revisions, or
- Reject.
Following the panel meetings, the conveners wrote summaries of the panel discussion for each resource; these were transmitted to the creator, along with anonymous versions of the reviews. Relatively few resources were accepted as is. In most cases, the majority of the resources were either designated as 1) Reject or 2) Accept with major revisions. Resources were most often rejected for their lack of completeness to be used in a classroom or they contained scientific inaccuracies.
This page first made public: Aug 30, 2006
This material is replicated on a number of sites as part of the SERC Pedagogic Service Project
Summary
Learning Goals
- Import data from text files
- Graph data and perform simple rate calculations
- Assess model behavior by comparing model predictions to observations
- Learn about World population and limited growth
Context for Use
Teaching Materials
- Activity Sheet (Excel 2003 version) (Acrobat (PDF) 694kB Aug10 03); Activity Sheet (Excel 2007 version) (Acrobat (PDF) 525kB Dec9 10)
- Answers Document (Excel 62kB Apr3 04) with several sheets representing different levels of completion. These Excel documents can be used for either:
- Introducing concepts and ideas in an interactive lecture
- Making transparencies or power point slides
- Checking student results
- A text file of UNEP data/projections UNEP Population ( 788bytes Apr3 04)
- Sample images of what's in the Excel Answer Document and what students are expected to accomplish.
Figure 1. Low, Medium, and High UNEP projections of world population
Figure 2. Med-UNEP medium projections for World population to 2050 and Logistic model "best" fit. (Ao=2.52, K=10.8, and r=2.8)
Teaching Notes and Tips
Assessment
Grading the completed activity sheet provided can be used as an assessment of student understanding. The future success of students on other Excel related activities is also another useful assessment tool.
An Excel Answers Document is provided above with several sheets representing different levels of completion for this activity. This can help instructors:
- assess student success for this activity;
- answer student questions that come up;
- quickly familiarize themselves with the activity.
References and Resources
World Population Activity I should be completed before doing this follow-up activity.
UNEP web site (more info) is an interactive site that has past and future population data.
