Monday, April 14, 2008
Statistics
For a student that is having trouble seeing the use in statistics I would first ask them what they are interested in. (Usual response will probably be movies, sports, etc.). I would then find statistics that can be found in their interest. Statistics are everywhere so it would be easy to find a connection between the student's interest and statistics. Our powerpoint assignment would be another way to show a student how applicable statistics is. I think the main goal should be to show a student that statistics is really used many places and does have meaning. Once that is accomplished, the student should be able to understand the lessons in class and begin to do well. Obviously, a teacher may be caught off guard when they get the "how am I ever going to use this?" question. At that point I may not have an exact answer at the moment, but will definitely come to the next class with a response. Students need to see that the mathematics topics they are learning do have an impact and relavance in their lives.
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3 comments:
Trina you said, "For a student that is having trouble seeing the use in statistics I would first ask them what they are interested in. (Usual response will probably be movies, sports, etc.). I would then find statistics that can be found in their interest. Statistics are everywhere so it would be easy to find a connection between the student's interest and statistics". Trina I really like this idea of getting students inpot first and them doing research. Another possible suggestion is for students to do the research themselves and see what they come up with.
Trina- Good response. Also, I do agree with Jon's comment. In addition, you mentioned that you would get back to the student with the answer. I like that idea and found myself doing that a few times during my student teaching experience!
Trina, I agree that finding out what the students are interested in is really important. Relating statistics to that would really gain their attention and that is the hard part. Real life applications are very important to mathematics for the students to see that math does have some relevance to their lives.
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