Richard Scheaffer and his colleagues work with the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics and the American Statistical Association to develop better ways to teach children quantitative skills.
What does popcorn have to do with statistics? A lot, says Richard Scheaffer, professor of statistics, who has helped develop curriculum materials to improve students' quantitative reasoning skills.
In order to help elementary-age children understand data collection and analysis, a big hot air popper is placed in the middle of the room. The top is left off so the kernels can fly all over. The students' job is to look for patterns in where the kernels land. They measure things such as how far the kernels travel from the popper and if the popped kernels go farther than the un-popped kernels. Scheaffer believes it's an active, fun way to introduce the basic concepts of data anlaysis.
"On the surface, a lot of the activities that we actually do sound pretty elementary," he said. "But it turns out that they can lead to a lot of quantitative reasoning and assessments of how well these skill are developing."
This is just one activity created by Scheaffer and his colleagues in their joint work between the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics and the American Statistical Association. Their overall goal has been to find better ways of teaching quantitative skills to all children from kindergarten through high school, culminating in an AP statistics course at the high school level.
'We're addressing the issue of how we can have a more quantitatively literate citizenry," he said. "To do this, we have to educate children more effectively. Our first project was for the middle school grades. It taught teachers how to help their students reason with data."
Because of this project-funded by the National Science Foundation-mathematics curricula nationwide now include more applications that involve fitting models to data. Scheaffer is pleased with the results and believes educating children in statistics at an early age is imperative because of the large amount of information they'll be exposed to as adults.
"This is probably more important in recent years because we live in an information society where everything is quantified," he said. "Unfortunately, many times the numbers and data are often suspect, but the general public doesn't realize that. They just don't know what value to place on the numbers and tend to think all numbers are important."
By taking advantage of new technology, Scheaffer and his colleagues have been able to develop practical exercises that would otherwise have been impossible.
"Now we have computers, and hand-held graphing calculators that will compute the statistics and show graphical displays at the push of a button," he said. "We do things quickly and easily with school kids that we wouldn't have been able to do 15-20 years ago."
In addition to creating a more literate public, an improved mathematics curriculum will also help our students be more competitive against students in other industrialized nations, Scheaffer said.
"That is one of our goals: to better educate our students in math and science so they'll be more competitive internationally," he said. "It seems we do a pretty good job of teaching kids basic manipulative skills such as adding, subtracting and multiplying, while our weakness seems to be in teaching reasoning and thinking skills. Teaching students how to reason with data will certainly help them."