Follow these steps to prepare for this assessment:

1. Select an article that uses statistical data related to a current event, your major, your current field, or your future career goal. The chosen article must have a publication date during this quarter. The Capella library contains newspapers such as USA Today, New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and Washington Post.
   • From the Capella University Library home page, use the Journals tab at the top of the search box to search for one of these newspapers. Then browse through the most recent articles. If you have a topic in mind, use Summon to search for your topic. Once you get your results, you can limit your results to "newspapers" and you can refine the publication date. If you aren't familiar with the library, the General Education Information Research Skills Library Guide is also a great place to start your search.
     • Example topics include (but are not limited to) elections or polls, award shows (Oscars, Emmys, or Grammys), sports, economy or job market, gender equality, or human rights issues.
   • Be sure the article should use one or more of the following categories of descriptive statistics:
     • Measures of frequency: Counting rules, percent, frequency, frequency distributions.
     • Measures of central tendency: Mean, median, mode.
     • Measures of dispersion or variation: Range, variance, standard deviation.
     • Measures of position: Percentile, quartiles, or quintiles.
     • Inferential statistics: Confidence intervals, margins of error.
2. Find a second, related article in the same or a different newspaper.
3. Review the Conference Application Template [DOCX] so you know the pieces of information expected for this assessment.

Note: If you need help with creating a PowerPoint presentation in either Windows or Mac, visit the PowerPoint section in Tools and Resources.

Note: The publications listed are suggestions. If you find an article from another source or if you are uncertain the article contains all of the information necessary to complete the assessment, please let your instructor know. Your instructor can help you determine whether it is a good fit for this assessment. If you need additional help locating an article, contact a Capella librarian for more assistance.

Instructions

Complete the following:

• Step 1: Using the data from the article you found, use the Conference Application Template [DOCX] to answer the following questions asked by the conference or meeting organizers. Remember to consider their expertise as professionals and use appropriate language to communicate your findings:
  • Highlight the purpose of the article and the problem it is trying to solve. Provide a summary in bullet form.
  • Explain how the article uses descriptive statistics to communicate information found in the study and any conclusions or solutions.
  • Explain how the article applies to the real world, your major, your current job, or your future career goal.
  • Include information from the second source or article and explain how it relates to the primary article.
  • Reflect on possible solutions using the mathematical and visual data provided.
• Step 2: An additional part of the application process requires you to create a presentation based on the information provided in the template.
  • Choose an audience based on your topic (outside of the field of mathematics) that could benefit from the information you will present. For example, this could be your local city council member, staff or administrators of a school, or employees at a company.
  • Analyze the data in the article to determine the best visual (graph or chart) to tell the story to your audience.
  • Use PowerPoint or another presentation tool to create one visualization of the data appropriate for the conference audience. Note: If the article already contains a visual, you must create a different type of graph or chart. Create more than one visualization to reach the Distinguished level (1-2 slides).
  • Explain how the audience can benefit from the data (2 slides).
  • Reflect on possible solutions using language appropriate for the audience (2 slides).
• Step 3: In the notes section of your final slide, answer the following questions:
  • Explain why you chose the audience in step 2.
  • Describe how the language, purpose, and visuals used in the presentation are appropriate for the audience.