District/School Administration PK-16 Program Support Educational Technology
Technology Toolkit

Apportionment Methods
North Shore Regional Vocational School District

Evidence of Effectiveness

Instructional objective: Students will be able to apply the various mathematical schemes for apportionment to any appropriate application, in particular, that of representation in a legislative body. Students will also be able to create a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet to represent the problem.

Evaluation: Students were tested (pencil and paper) on the methodology of the various apportionment methods. They were assigned problems involving spreadsheets outside of class, and they used Excel to create spreadsheets of the apportionment problem results.

Student improvement: Students were able to employ thinking skills in realistic problems using larger data sets, as the use of the spreadsheet eliminated the problem presented by large numbers of routine calculations. Also, planning the design and layout of the spreadsheets, as well as the logic and syntax of the formulas needed, presented an opportunity for higher-level thinking. (A reference sheet was used for students to record notes regarding formulas for class exercises.)

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