The activity below was created as part of the St. Louis Federal Reserve Bank’s Summer School Program session on using Data and Primary Source Documents. I plan to use it as a whole-class activity during the upcoming year and I’ll post updates after I try it (check the economics tag).
Averaging and Graphing with GeoFRED
Objectives:
- Introduce GeoFRED as a tool for analyzing real economic data over space.
- Learn/practice graphing.
- Practice basic averaging using real data.
- Prepare and deliver group presentations.
Resources:
- GeoFRED graph of unemployment by state: Geofred-annual-unemp-1995-2009
- GeoFRED Graph
Initial presentation to entire class
Show animation of unemployment in the US (by state) over their lifetimes (e.g. 1998-2009). The pdf file Geofred-annual-unemp-1995-2009 has the maps from 1995 to 2009 that you can click through to animate. Alternatively, you can create the pdf yourself from the GeoFRED Graph. A final option, if you’re desperate, is to use the animated gif above.
- Note: point out the effect of Hurricane Katrina on Louisiana (compare 2005 and 2006).
- See if students can identify interesting changes that they are curious about. The intention is to get students interested in the data and asking questions and give ideas about why the changes have occurred in general and for specific states.
Group/individual work
The class picks a state that they’re interested in (everyone has to do the same state to bring the data back together at the end) and:
- each group/individual gets the 12 months of data for one year in the time series (from the website).
- They create a graph (line or bar students get the choice) of their 12 months of data.
- Note: If we provide students with poster paper and a uniform scale for their axes they could merge their data at the end to create one very long graph. Alternately, if they all produce their own, very different, graphs they might produce nicer graphs that they’re more invested in, and better appreciate the need to calculate the averages when combining all the data.)
- They average their 12 months of data to get the annual average.
- Discuss among themselves why things might have changed the way they did over the year
- Do research (perhaps the beige book archive (very good regional summaries) or burgundy books (can’t find a long archive) and/or Wikipedia) to find out about why the changes may have occurred.
- Prepare a short presentation about their year for the rest of the class based on what they found (including their graph).
Class reconvenes
Now for presentations, discussion and integration.
- Each group gives a short presentation about what they found.
- The groups bring their averages together to plot a graph for the entire 12 years.
- Discuss how things changed over time – recessions when and why.
Advanced work
Now that students know how to use GeoFRED they can pose and answer a research question, perhaps one that came up during the initial presentation of the animation.
Additional suggestions
Instead of doing this by state, we could do it by Fed district to see how the regional economic systems are very different.