Phase 5: SHORT REPORT ON Conferring with my Colleagues AND FOCUS GROUP LESSON
To find potential solutions to the dilemmas of student workload and students with varied math abilities, I reached out to two of my colleagues at Kennedy High School. The first was a special education teacher who works in both science and math inclusion classes, including one of my IB biology classes and one of the IB math classes. She told me that everything I was trying to accomplish in my ImagineIT project fit perfectly into the IB Math Studies curriculum. In response to my concern that the students would be overburdened by the extra work, she said they have to learn statistics for math anyway, so they are not learning something they don’t need. As for my concern about the the abilities of the students to grasp the concepts, she told me it would be helpful to free up a few days to address the topics in detail. The second colleague I conferred with was the math department chair who has been teaching the Math Studies class that my IB students currently take. In response to my concern about the workload, he told me that the project would kill two birds with one stone because the Math Studies course requires students to complete a large written report on a mathematical concept of their choosing. He said that given the focus of my ImagineIT project it would make sense for students to be directed to choose a statistics topic for their Math Studies report. In response to my concerns about student abilities he said, “The benefits of statistics is that it’s formulaic. Decisions are not mathematical, they are more conceptual and about definitions. Once you choose a test, it’s just plugging in numbers. It’s choosing the right formula and plugging. Especially with the technology.”
I then approached my students with an introductory lesson meant to peak their interest and surface questions on the topic of statistics. In this lesson students read an article about data analysis where different research groups reached different conclusions when given the same question and data set. (The question was, do dark skinned soccer players get red cards more often than light-skinned ones?) Through annotating and discussing the text, students came up with inquiry questions about the topic. Questions included, “How could they get so many different conclusions?”, “What’s different about each of the statistical models?” and “How do variables get defined?” After the lesson I asked students if this lesson made them want to investigate statistics and the responses were positive. One student on the soccer team was very passionate to learn if the refs really were racist. Another student said she was surprised there was so much uncertainty and opinion that went into statistics. Still another said that this showed her she needs to be more skeptical.
Reviewing the feedback, I can see the main trends are the synergy with the math team and that the challenges of statistics are not computational, but conceptual. Based on the feedback, I am going to take the advice of my colleagues and pursue this project as a partnership between Biology and Math Studies. As we move through the year, I will preview my lab activities with the math teachers so they can go over the statistic skills in the weeks leading up to the lab. Additionally, I will time my students presentation project to align with their Math Studies project so they can use the material they gather and the content they create for both projects.
I then approached my students with an introductory lesson meant to peak their interest and surface questions on the topic of statistics. In this lesson students read an article about data analysis where different research groups reached different conclusions when given the same question and data set. (The question was, do dark skinned soccer players get red cards more often than light-skinned ones?) Through annotating and discussing the text, students came up with inquiry questions about the topic. Questions included, “How could they get so many different conclusions?”, “What’s different about each of the statistical models?” and “How do variables get defined?” After the lesson I asked students if this lesson made them want to investigate statistics and the responses were positive. One student on the soccer team was very passionate to learn if the refs really were racist. Another student said she was surprised there was so much uncertainty and opinion that went into statistics. Still another said that this showed her she needs to be more skeptical.
Reviewing the feedback, I can see the main trends are the synergy with the math team and that the challenges of statistics are not computational, but conceptual. Based on the feedback, I am going to take the advice of my colleagues and pursue this project as a partnership between Biology and Math Studies. As we move through the year, I will preview my lab activities with the math teachers so they can go over the statistic skills in the weeks leading up to the lab. Additionally, I will time my students presentation project to align with their Math Studies project so they can use the material they gather and the content they create for both projects.