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Helping Your Students Develop Statistical Understanding and Enjoy The Experience

This document discusses how to use real-world data from the CensusAtSchool (C@S) resource to help students develop statistical understanding in an engaging way. [1] It provides examples of how the C@S data on student characteristics can be used to explore statistical concepts for different year levels. [2] Registering is free and easy, allowing students to complete an online questionnaire and examine the data to make comparisons. [3]

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mellonela
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36 views3 pages

Helping Your Students Develop Statistical Understanding and Enjoy The Experience

This document discusses how to use real-world data from the CensusAtSchool (C@S) resource to help students develop statistical understanding in an engaging way. [1] It provides examples of how the C@S data on student characteristics can be used to explore statistical concepts for different year levels. [2] Registering is free and easy, allowing students to complete an online questionnaire and examine the data to make comparisons. [3]

Uploaded by

mellonela
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Download as PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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Reasoning,

not Recipes
Helping your students develop statistical understanding
and enjoy the experience!

Gai Mooney
Australian Bureau of Statistics
<[email protected]>

S tatistics is often presented to students as a series of algorithms to be


learnt by heart and applied at the appropriate time to get “the correct
answer”. This approach, while it may in fact produce the right answer, has
been shown to be minimally effective at helping students understand the
underlying statistical concepts. For many years statistics educators have
argued that it is the language of statistics not the computations, that
matter. As Holmes (2003, p. 452) noted, “Statistics is not just a set of tech-
niques, it is an attitude of mind in approaching data”.
Statistical concepts are much more easily grasped when the data used is
real and the context is real to the students (see for example Nicholson,
Ridgway and McCusker, 2006; Jordan and Haines, 2006). The
CensusAtSchool (C@S) resource from the Australian Bureau of Statistics
(ABS) is real data which is interesting and engaging for students. C@S data
was collected from Australian students in 2006 and 2008 and is available
free from the ABS website (www.abs.gov.au/censusatschool). Data collec-
tion is now open for 2010, and from now on will be annual.
The C@S questionnaire contains questions relating to physical charac-
teristics (such as height, arm span, foot size), behaviour (amount of sleep,
breakfast habits, favourite sport) and attitudes (water use, pollution,
bullying) of students. There is also an interactive concentration game and a
reaction time game. Over 100 000 students submitted their responses in
2006 and 45 000 in 2008. All this data is available for free download from
the website. The 2010 data will be available from July.
As well, you can download many classroom activities and suggestions to
help you successfully use C@S. Students can generate their own random
samples or prepared samples can be downloaded from the website.
Although extracting their own sample is more time consuming, the possi-
bilities that this creates for better understanding of concepts such as
randomness, variability, sample size etc. often make it worthwhile, espe-
cially for older students.
The examples below show some further ways this data can be used to
* This paper has
not been peer- engage students and improve statistical understanding across many year
reviewed.
levels.

22 amt 66 (2) 2010


Years 7 and 8

To produce, understand and interpret


tables and graphs of various types is a
consistent curriculum requirement across
all states and territories. C@S allows you to
address these requirements, engage your
students and improve their understanding.
As well as the suggestions on the website, Figure 1
there are many questions that you can
explore with your students while they learn about data. For example: How
do students get to school? Does this change as students get older? Are there
differences between boys and girls? (See Figure 1.)
Because there is such rich and varied data in the C@S resource, it also
helps your students understand why particular graphs are appropriate in
some circumstances but not others. When students have to make these
decisions themselves, they develop a deeper understanding of statistical
ideas.

Years 9 and 10

By the end of Year 10 your students have been asked to grapple with a
number of potentially difficult statistical concepts. The CensusAtSchool
resource allows these concepts to be explored using data that makes sense
to the students and with which they can identify. For example the difference
between population and sample, and hence the idea of “random”. Simply
having each of your students generate their own sample from the C@S
Random Sampler powerfully demonstrates how the summary statistics
cluster even though all students will have drawn a different sample.
Outliers (what they are, how they affect data and what to do with them)
can also be a difficult concept for your students. The CensusAtSchool data
has not been “cleaned”, so it includes outliers (as well as missing values).
Students need to make decisions about
what should be discarded, and this encour-
ages them to ask questions of statistical
data, not just follow formulae. These deci-
sions are aided by plotting the data (eg
finding the interquartile range with a box
plot), but they cannot be entirely answered
with mathematics. Students are often
uncomfortable making non-mathematical
judgements in a maths classroom, but the
C@S data helps them make sense of these Figure 2. Graph with outliers included.
issues. No-one is 1.5 cm tall for example, or
has their belly button higher than their
height. Students can also examine the effect
of outliers on the mean, median and mode
with real data which helps them recognise
how one individual value can influence
measures of central tendency (see Figures 2
and 3).
CensusAtSchool includes both categor-
ical and (continous) numeric data, and Figure 3. Graph with outliers excluded.

amt 66 (2) 2010 23


there are a number of questions that lend themselves to looking at rela-
tionships. Does eating breakfast improve reaction times? Is there a
relationship between height and arm span? (See Figure 3.)

It is easy—and free—to participate

Register
Set up a Teacher Account at www.abs.gov.au/censusatschool —it will only
take about five minutes. Generate Student Access Numbers (SANs) for your
students and you are ready to go. (If you have registered in previous years,
all you need to do is generate SANs for your students from your Teacher
Account.) Download the printable version of the questionnaire for your own
records.
Prepare
Explain to the students that they will be completing an online questionnaire
that thousands of other Australian students have already completed.
Afterwards they will be examining the data to make comparisons between
year level, boys and girls and, for some variables even different countries.
Have your students measure their height, arm span, foot length and
distance from their belly button to the ground. They will need these
measurements to submit the questionnaire.
Complete the online questionnaire
Give each student their unique SAN and they are ready to complete the
online questionnaire. If you collect your own class data you can then
compare your class with others.
Finding stories in the data
As well as using the examples above, or those from the webpages, do not
forget to ask students what they think they can find out from the informa-
tion? What questions can they ask? Your students may need some
prompting, but this is a very powerful technique. It not only gets students
owning their work and enjoying it, it also reinforces that statistics is as
much about asking sensible questions as it is about finding appropriate
answers.
Some ideas to start your students off include: Who has the faster reac-
tion time: girls or boys? Who was quicker completing the concentration
game: girls or boys? Are Grade 5 students as quick as Year 9 students? How
do most students get to school? Is this different for boys and girls? Between
different grades? How does this class compare with students of the same
age around Australia? In other countries? What are students’ attitudes to
some environmental questions? Are these constant across ages and time
(compare 2006, 2008 and after July, 2010 as well)?

So register now and show your students that statistics can be fun! For
further information, contact the ABS Education Services Unit at
[email protected] or free call 1800 623 273.

References
Jordan, J. & Haines, B. (2006). The role of statistics educators in the quantitative literacy
movement. Journal of Statistics Education, 14(2). Accessed 21 March 2007 at
http://www.amstat.org/publications/jse/v14n2/jordan.html.
Nicholson, J., Ridgway, J. & McCusker, S. (2006). Reasoning with data — Time for a
rethink? Teaching Statistics, 28(1), 2–9.

24 amt 66 (2) 2010

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