Background Information for Teachers

Here are professional resources that offer deeper insight into statistical concepts, set out teaching strategies, and provide support materials for your work in the classroom.

Learning Math: Data Analysis, Statistics, and Probability http://learner.org/channel/courses/learningmath/data/index.html

This online workshop for elementary and middle school teachers introduces several ways to organize, represent, and describe data. Participants in this free, college-level course consider practical problems of designing experiments, such as random sampling, and explore basic ideas of probability. In a final session, teachers break into grade bands to explore ways to apply these concepts in classrooms. Each of the ten sessions in the workshop contains video segments, problem-solving activities, a guide for the workshop leader, and interactive activities online. This is one of the professional course offerings from Annenberg Media Learner.org.

Exploring data http://exploringdata.cqu.edu.au/

This web site, created by Australian educator Rex Boggs, provides curriculum support materials for middle school and high school teachers of introductory statistics. The materials include activities, worksheets, overheads, data sets, and assessment items, plus an extensive collection of articles designed to enhance the statistics knowledge of the teacher. Topics range from box plots and sampling to normal distributions and confidence intervals. MSP full record

Gallery of Data Visualization: The Best and Worst of Statistical Graphics http://www.math.yorku.ca/SCS/Gallery/

This site offers graphical images that represent data from a range of sources (historical events, spread of disease, distribution of resources). The author contrasts the differences between the best and worst graphics by showing how some images communicate data clearly and truthfully, while others misrepresent, lie, or totally fail to "say something." If you are looking for innovative representations of data or examples of misrepresentation, you will find this resource helpful. (From Ohio resource center for mathematics, science, and reading — MSP full record)

Stats for Schools http://www.stats4schools.gov.uk./

Stats4Schools, developed by the United Kingdom's Office of National Statistics, offers datasets, lesson plans, and worksheets to be used in the classroom. The lesson ideas are organized by topics and involve using statistics to answer questions such as these: Do girls pull their weight more than boys at home? Are you at risk from the sun? MSP full record

Dealing With Data in the Elementary School http://illuminations.nctm.org/LessonDetail.aspx?id=L297

This project-based unit on statistics furnishes a vehicle for problem solving through real-world data collection and analysis. Students use the mean, mode and median to analyze their data and use graphs to represent their findings. As a professional resource, the unit provides an explanation of The Elementary Mathematics Research Model. Rather than being taught as isolated topics, the statistical tools are used in applying the research model to real situations. Teachers are guided in taking their students through the seven steps in the model. (From Illuminations, National Council of Teachers of Mathematics Vision for School Mathematics — MSP full record)

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Copyright June 2008 — The Ohio State University. This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. 0424671. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.