The YSU MathFest

Statistical Poster Competition

Helpful Comments

Getting Started

Designing a good statistical poster is all about 1) finding an interesting question that you would like to answer, 2) collecting, organizing, and interpreting data that will help you answer the question, and 3) presenting the results in a clear manner with graphics and pictures that visually tell a story about the question you have answered.

If you would like to get your mind going in the right direction and would like to see some examples of award winning posters, you can check out the ASA's website that posts the National Winners from previous years.

Finding a Topic

The topic of the poster is the choice of the participants, so pick a subject that interests you. The topic does not need to be brand new; the questions and data can be from your other high school projects or competitions. You can browse some of the winners above to see what kinds of questions they have answered, and then try to think about something similar you might like to investigate.

Collecting the Data

Collecting data properly is challenging. Students who find data that have already been compiled often do not realize the pitfalls and potential errors of data collection and, as a consequence, they miss an opportunity to understand this vital phase of any project. For this reason, the scoring rubric emphasizes data collection by the students. Therefore, projects in which students collect data "from scratch" are viewed more highly than those in which students utilize existing data. That being said, just because you find the data somewhere else (on the internet, at the library, etc.) does not mean that your poster will get a bad score. Indeed, some of the best posters take data that already exist, but they analyze the data in a creative and novel way.

There are hundreds of ready-collected data sets organized and freely available to browse in the Data and Story Library (DaSL) at Carnegie Mellon University. Feel free to analyze an interesting dataset there (but remember to cite your references!)

Presenting the Results

Again, check out the masters above to get some ideas about graphics that work. Also, the Basic Guidelines section of "What is a Statistical Poster?" gives numerous tips and advice about do's and don'ts on a poster. One of the key notions is: present the graphics in a way that communicates the important ideas clearly.

Judges' Comments from the Past

On the ASA website is a page that lists judges' comments from the Grade 10-12 Statistical Project Competition in 2004. Although it originally was meant to regard Projects (a little different from Posters), still the comments are highly applicable to the YSU Poster Competition. Have a look!