The Details: In this exercise, I encouraged students to use TOR, Trinity's catalog for online resources, including data resources, to locate two data resources: the Statistical Abstract of the United States and the Human Development Report. On the day Laurel distributed this exercise to the students (see handout.doc), I came to the class and introduced them to these online tools and resources.

For the first part of this exercise, I asked students to find infant mortality rates in the U.S. for blacks and whites in different states. I purposefully pointed them towards states that would illustrate how varied infant mortality rates are in this country.

I then asked the students to find data on infant mortality rates in other countries. For this part of the exercise, students needed to find both countries with low or high rates, as well as countries that had experienced extreme or only minor drops in their rates over time.

The Downloads: handout (.doc)

(Warning: links on this handout may have changed from the date of original use)

The Goals: From my standpoint, there were two pedagogical goals for this exercise. I wanted students:

• To recognize TOR as a local resource for finding data
• To recognize the Statistical Abstract and the Human Development Report as two particularly useful data resources
• To get into the practice of interpreting aggregate numbers by putting them in context, by comparing numbers from different regions and racial groups and over time

Figure 1