Using Kid’s Zone to Produce Quick, Easy, and Good-looking Graphs

I have used the Kid’s Zone website to produce a good-looking graph of the NAEP 4th grade mathematics scores from 2000 to 2007, comparing West Virginia’s scores to the national average. From this graph, I can quickly conclude that West Virginia students have kept pace with the national average, although West Virginia’s math score are consistently lower by a few points. The source for this data is the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP).

Is the high number of West Virginia students with an IEP due to the low per capita income of West Virginians? To answer this question, we can look at other poor states and determine if they also have a high number of IEP students. Using the data provided by the website infoplease http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0104652, I was able to determine the four poorest states for 2006. In order of lowest per capita income, they are Mississippi ($27028), West Virginia ($28206), Arkansas ($28206), and Utah ($29406). This data is sourced to the U.S. Department of Commerce, Bureau of Economic Analysis, Survey of Current Business. Web: www.bea.doc.gov/bea/regional/spi/.

To obtain information about the number of IEP studnets in these states, I used the U.S. Department of Education's National Center for Education Statistics, which gives the desired data for each state. Plotting these data on a bar graph for the four poorest states and the U.S., it is immediately clear that the per capita income has little or no effect on the fraction of students with IEPs. If there was an anticorrelation between income and IEP, we would expect that Mississippi would have a high percentage of IEPs and that there would be a gradual decline between West Virginia and Arkansas. Yet Mississippe is right at the national average and Arkansas and Utah is even below the national average, suggesting that many other higher income states have higher percentage of students in IEP. Thus we can not say that per capita income itself has a direct bearing on the number of IEP students in West Virginia.
I used the Kid's Zone graphing tool to produce the above graphs. I found this online application to be very intuitive and it produced great graphics. It should be easy to introduce to my students and encourage them to use. My procedure for using Kid's Zone was to produce the graph using hand-entered data (I found no feature to allow importing data, but I should research this a little more). When I was finished producing the graph, I saved it as a .jpeg file, and saved it to my PC into my EDUC6305 folder. I then open my new blog entry, presses the Add Image button, and uploaded the files to Blogger, starting with the last graph in the blog first (thus the first graph in the blog was loaded last). Blogger always adds images to the very top of the blog entry, or I have not figured out how to position images within the previously written blog text yet. Note that I always center my image in the blog entry; this prevents the text from being pushed over to the side if the image is small enough to allow it, and most blog use this style anyway. I also opened the Kid's Zone graphs with MS Paint and could manipualted/copy them from there also.