Exploring data landscapes and so much more
It was awesome to be one of the opening speakers at this year’s US Conference on Teaching Statistics this morning at 4am – thank you again Allan Rossman and Kelly McConville for the invitation! Each of the speakers had five minutes to share something related to the conference theme of Broadening horizons, and all of […]
Believing assessment is awesome :-)
Assessment is awesome. How great is it when students complete a task and feel success with applying something they have learned? Without feedback on our work, how would we know which areas we need to improve? Assessment is important as it validates and values teaching and learning. The thing about assessment is that you are not going […]
What are our awesome messages?
For different topics I teach, I try to pull out what the three key aspects are that will be connected and tested to uncover student understanding. This approach is not the same as trying to define what happens at each stage of PPDAC. Trust me, I have developed detailed rubrics for every statistics standard and while […]
Not so awesome interpretations …
Being able to communicate an interpretation of a confidence interval is important. The reason why we care so much about students writing good investigative questions is so that when they come to answer these questions as a result of their exploration and analysis of the data, they are clear about what they were trying to […]
Using awesome real data …
There is a lot of real data out there that can be used for learning about statistics. It’s important, though, to choose data with variables students can understand and can connect with. I was really inspired by a talk Rob Gould gave at the NZAMT conference in July 2015 about professional versus modern data (you […]
Using awesome contexts … and questions!
The New Zealand Income Survey SURF data set from Statistics New Zealand is a great resource (as are the many other awesome things available from Statistics New Zealand). I used this context and data set initially with a group of Year 13 students who had come through our “applied” pathway (see an earlier post on how […]
Making awesome connections between standards …
Is there a way to get some great connections happening between standards that could also benefit student learning? Could we use the same set of sample data to explore relationships between different combinations of categorical and numerical variables and as a consequence get deeper statistical and contextual understanding happening? To do this requires an overall question that […]
Getting the awesome messages heard …
Learning about statistics is awesome – it helps you to make sense of the world and it helps you to make good decisions when faced with uncertainty. It shouldn’t be that difficult to get these kinds of messages across to teenagers since they are so important. But then think about what decisions teenagers actually get […]
Setting up awesome investigations …
Statistical investigations are not necessarily the same thing as teaching activities. They can be pretty close but one area where I think we could do things more awesomely is spending more time pulling students into the context for the investigation. We don’t need to start with questions and problem development right at the beginning, and then […]
Working with teenagers is awesome …
Teaching teenagers statistics is such an awesome job. These 10 ways to easily engage with teenagers by Chris Hudson will not be unknown to any high school teacher and could pretty much serve the foundation of any lesson plan. I definitely have found that considering these kinds of ways to connect with teenagers in your […]