Rebecca Kurtz and her group mate Karen Goldbeger had chosen to focus on the coalition between educational experiences and ADHD diagnosis. Inspired by the rising “ADHD epidemic” they decided to use statistics to see if there were any trends with ADHD diagnosis. When viewing a map of all of the cases of ADHD in America it is easy enough to see that most cases were concentrated around urban areas while the rural parts of America had very few ADHD cases. Rebecca and Karen wanted to see if quality education and understanding environments provided by psychologists and teachers could decrease the amount of ADHD cases, or if they could at least have a positive influence.
This topic was extremely intriguing to me since I had worked with students with ADHD throughout high school as a Spanish student teacher. Rebecca’s data was very thorough, almost too thorough. She had called the APA for the exact number of psychologists in each state. She then used that data in combination with the amount of ADHD diagnosis in a given area to see if there was any real relationship between the two. She repeated the graph, replacing the number of psychologists with the quality of education in a given area. In my opinion the second graph is subjective, because the variables that make up a school ranking can not cover everything that would be considered a “quality education”.
They used a complicated statistical formula to ultimately answer their question, and no there was no clear relationship between the three variables. However, some of the data is subjective so there wouldn’t have been a clear answer either way.
I really liked their poster it had a good balance of visuals and words. Rebecca’s presentation was engaging and her answers to my questions were very thoughtful.
