Did you see any of the Fish Season on Channel 4 in January? Lots of chefs, including Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, Jamie Oliver and Gordon Ramsay, were joined by other celebrities to encourage people to think about the fish that they eat.

One of the aims of The Fish Fight is to encourage people to eat less of “the usual suspects” salmon, cod and tuna, and to eat more sustainable fish such as those listed on the right of the screen How many people in your school regularly eat fish? Do they only eat the three usual suspects? What percentage of people have tried the more sustainable fish? What percentage eat them regularly? Design a fair survey to find out.

Pick a colour for your group. Are you yellow or red? Another aim of The Big Fish Fight is to get mackerel, a sustainable fish, as an option in fish and chip shops. Will people buy it? If you chose yellow, then design a questionnaire that is biased towards a positive result, that people will buy mackerel from their fish and chip shop. If you chose red, then design a questionnaire that is biased towards a negative result, that people will not buy mackerel from their fish and chip shop. You should include the questions you will ask, as well as details about the way that you would carry out your survey. This YouTube clip might offer some support for biased surveys Pick a colour for your group. Are you yellow or red?

It’s in the News! Fish Fight! Teacher Notes

Fish Fight! Introduction: Content objectives: Process objectives: Did you see any of the Fish Season on Channel 4 in January? A group of chefs, including Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, Jamie Oliver and Gordon Ramsay, were joined by other celebrities to encourage people to think about the fish that they eat, the way that it’s farmed or caught, and to consider other alternatives to their usual fish supper, as well as to raise awareness of the policy of ‘discards’ that fishermen must follow. This resource uses The Big Fish Fight as a context for students to explore surveys and whether they are fair or biased.. Content objectives: This context provides the opportunity for teachers and students to explore a number of objectives. Some that may be addressed are: design a survey or experiment to capture the necessary data from one or more sources; design, trial and if necessary refine data collection sheets justify the sampling method selected, identify possible sources of bias and plan how to minimise it. Process objectives: These will depend on the amount of freedom you allow your class with the activity. It might be worth considering how you’re going to deliver the activity and highlighting the processes that this will allow on the diagram below:

Activity: Differentiation: Working in groups: Assessment: This activity uses Channel 4’s The Big Fish Fight campaign as the context for exploring biased surveys. There are two activities which are connected by a context but do not rely on one another. In the first activity, students are invited to design a fair survey to find out how much fish people in their school eat, what types of fish they eat and whether they have tried any of the more sustainable options promoted by the Fish Fight. Students will need to decide what is meant by words such as ‘regularly’ and ensure that their survey is as fair as possible. In the second activity, students are asked to design an unfair survey exploring whether the public would buy mackerel from their local fish and chip shop. A well-known clip from Yes Minister could be used as an example of leading questions and students are also invited to explain how they would carry out their survey. Details given might include the place, the time, the number of people surveyed etc. If you use the activities in order you might like to invite your class to look back at the first activity having completed the second and decide whether their original survey was leading or biased, and to consider ways of addressing this. Differentiation: To make the task easier you could consider: using only the first activity offering a number of possible questions for the survey and asking students to pick the ‘best’ ones for their survey. To make the task more complex you could consider: asking the students to work on the second activity before showing them the video and then to adjust their work if necessary asking the students to use the results of their biased surveys and represent them graphically in a biased way.. Working in groups: This activity lends itself to paired discussion work and small group work and, by encouraging students to work collaboratively, it is likely that you will allow them access to more of the key processes than if they were to work individually. Assessment: You may wish to consider how you will assess the task and how you will record your assessment. This could include developing the assessment criteria with your class. You might choose to focus on the content objectives or on the process objectives. You might decide that this activity lends itself to comment only marking or to student self-assessment. If you use the APP model of assessment then you might use this activity to help you in building a picture of your students’ understanding. Assessment criteria to focus on might be: ask questions, plan how to answer them and collect the data required (handling data level 5) design a survey or experiment to capture the necessary data from one or more sources; design trial and, if necessary, refine data collection sheets (handling data level 6) identify possible sources of bias and plan how to minimise it (handling data level 7). Probing questions: These might include: why are cod, tuna and salmon so popular? where might you buy more ‘sustainable’ fish? where would you go to find lots of people who like cod? do you think that the data given on the Big Fish Fight website is unbiased? which sources of data do you trust to be unbiased? how would you check that the results of a survey presented in the news are unbiased?

You will need: The PowerPoint presentation. There are three slides: The first slide introduces The Big Fish Fight campaign. The second slide poses the questions “How many people in your school regularly eat fish? Do they only eat the three usual suspects? What percentage of people have tried the more sustainable fish? What percentage eat them regularly?” and asks students to design a survey to explore this. The final slide randomly asks students to design a biased survey to find out whether the public would buy mackerel at a fish and chip shop. There is a link to a YouTube video from Yes Minister in the box at the bottom of the slide.