How to Analyze Election Voter Data for What it Means

Ashley Miller

This unit focuses on civic participation and students being able to understand who participates by voting and ways that they can try to convince people that they should participate. There are three main lessons for this unit. The first lesson covers analyzing who votes. Looking at large tables of statistical data can be overwhelming to students, and adults, so the students will start by analyzing class data to understand the conversion of number counts to percentages. Students will look at age, height, and eye color to count and calculate percentages in a large table to understand these numbers and calculations on a smaller scale. We will then analyze voter data for the most recent presidential election, which will hopefully be more easily understood with the scaffolding of the class data. Lesson two will cover the reasons that people don’t vote and how we can convince them otherwise. Students will work in pairs using the Think-Pair-Share method. Lesson Three will have the students learn advertising techniques to create a persuasive piece to convince non-voters to vote.