I love teaching AP Statistics. What I love even more is doing Statistics. When we came to the end of the first (of four) units in this course, Descriptive Statistics, I was looking for a way to let my students practice the Statistics we had learned. Last year we created and administered a silly little survey about how the start of school was going for Carondelet and DLS students. This survey certainly served it’s purpose and added an element of fun.
This year, I wanted to do something different. Having been a pretty bad member of the Sr. Clare Dunn Forum planning committee (I think I’ve missed every meeting this year) I thought there might be a way for me to make up for that, and a way to connect my students to this school-wide event. I reached out to Kristy Schow with my idea and asked her what would be useful to know about our school community ahead of the forum. Here’s her response:
1. Why does the criminal justice system need reform? Does it need reform? In what ways?
2. Is meaningful reform possible in our political/economic/social climate? Why/why not? What type of reform is most meaningful/beneficial?
3. Are there alternatives to prison? What are they? When are they appropriate?
4. What are the social impacts of imprisonment and the economic impacts?
5. What injustices do we see in our prison system and our criminal justice system? What is the solution?
While these questions were great, they were too broad and open-ended to put on a survey. And what I love about this is that this is exactly what happens with real research every day. A researcher (Kristy) wants to know information about a group of people and it’s the job of the Statistician (my students) to flesh out the needed information and operationalize them into concrete variables with categories or numerical responses. In one 45 minute period I divided my class into five groups and gave each group one of the questions above. Their job was to turn the one broad question into 3-4 survey questions. At the same time, they had to think of any important demographic/background variables needed on our survey. Here‘s what they came up with.
We posted the survey to Schoology and within a week had over 500 responses! They spent the next 2-3 weeks analyzing the results, using Minitab Statistical software, and building a report and poster to summarize their findings.
Today we hung our posters in the inner-court, contributing to the impressive museum that the planning committee has created.
We hope you can visit and see what our community thinks about prison reform and how these beliefs trend based on gender, political views and other demographics.
Today was a win for me. Allowing my students to see that Statistics is a math tool with far reaching potential (most people don’t see Math and Social Studies as a natural pairing) is an important lesson. I hope it might pique some of their career interests and help them see the flexibility, and the power, of Math. I also love that there was a service component to this project. While we could have come up with our own topic on which to survey students, it was much more rich to act as consultants, work with Kristy’s broad themes and create a survey that actually served others. This was a great example of school work being the total opposite of busy work. The work they created, in a class, served to educate our community on an important, relevant and timely topic.
What other ways can we create school-wide events where we as teachers can create projects that allow us to collaborate and serve the school?
