MAKERERE UNIVERSITY

COLLEGE OF EDUCATION AND EXTERNAL STUDIES.

SCHOOL OF EDUCATION

COURSE UNIT: EDUCATIONAL MEASUREMENT AND RESEARCH

COURSE CODE: PSE 2201

NAME: AGABA INGRID

REG. NO: 18/U/25227/PS
Question.
Discuss the different ways of presenting data about students progress.
Presentation of data is the organization of data into tables, graphs and charts so that logically and
statistically conclusions are derived from the collected measurements.
For data to be presented, it should be arranged in either ascending or descending order.
Data to be presented may be grouped, ungrouped or even simple data.
There are three ways / methods in which data can be presented and these are textual, tabular or
graphical.
Briefly these can be explained as follows;
Textual method; a narrative description of the data gathered / collected from the students’
progress.
Tabular method; this is a systematic arrangement of information about students’ progress in
rows and columns.
Graphical method; this is an illustrative distribution of data to be presented.
In full detail, each method serves a role as illustrated below
Textual representation of data means presenting data in the form of words, sentences and
paragraphs. The merit with textual presentation of data it allows the researcher to present
qualitative data that cannot be presented in graphical or tabular form.
Tabular representation of data as a method of data presentation is a systematic and logical
arrangement of data in form of rows and columns with respect to the characteristics of data
gathered. It is orderly arrangement which is compact and self-explanatory. Under this method
tables are used.

The table above has three rows and four columns.

Graphical representation of data is a way of analyzing numerical data. It is the most popular
and widely method used in presenting data. Under this method various graphs are used and these
include bar graphs, histogram, frequency curves, frequency polygons.
i. Bar Graphs; are used to display the category of data and it compares the data using solid
bars to represent the quantities.
Under this bars do not touch each other while presenting data.
 The diagram below shows an illustration of a bar graph.
14

12

10

0
Category 1 Category 2 Category 3 Category 4

Series 1 Series 2 Series 3

ii. Histograms; These are graphs that use bars to represent the frequency of numerical data
that are organized into intervals. The vertical axis carries frequency and the horizontal
axis carries class boundaries.
The diagram below shows a histogram.
 iii. A cumulative frequency curve; is a curve that represents cumulative frequency
distribution of group data on a graph and it is known as an ogive curve. Representing
cumulative frequency data on a graph is the most efficient way to understand the data and
derive results.

iv. Frequency polygons; these are graphical devices that are used for understanding the
shapes of distributions. They serve the same purpose as histograms though they help to
compare sets of data.
Frequency polygons are also a good choice for displaying cumulative frequency
distributions.
Note: As earlier stated that both frequency polygons and histograms serve the same
purpose, they are also different in some way where by on the histogram, the vertical axis
carries frequency and horizontal axis carries class boundaries while on the frequency
polygon the vertical axis carries the frequency and the horizontal axis carries class marks
or mid points.
In conclusion therefore, data about students’ progress is presented in three different methods as
discussed above.