Reasoning from Data and Chance Summary

Monday - Friday, July 5 - 9, 2010

During the second week groups continue to work on their projects. We naturally divided into three groups to work on projects. Doug and Andy are working on using statistics to examine soccer data about world cup. Specifically the data is about yellow cards and goals scored from world cup data from the FIFA site. The lesson will include guided explorations on key statistical topics, for example distributions, shapes and measures of the center of variations. In addition, students will be asked to look at association, and consider correlation found in the data set.

Amanda, Carol, and Chance are developing a lesson where students will work with prepared graphs created from actual US Census data to theorize missing variables through reasoning and discussion. The overall goal is to encourage students to understand the meaning of the variables and the social context of the variables. Students will then verify their conclusions using the original data set from which the graphs were created and comparing their graphs to the given graphs.

Vicki and Jane are working together to develop a lesson to help students find and interpret p-values, particularly when working with unfamiliar sampling distributions. All groups are planning to use Fathom software to present their data and possibly have students use the software as well.

Gail came to talk to the entire group on Tuesday about using TI-Nspires to teach about data and distributions, confidence intervals, and other statistical topics. We had a lively discussion about the applications and ways to use them with students. Bill emphasized that a good data set provides richness in a discussion and that teachers must explore the data set fully before presenting problems using it.

Back to Journal Index