Education 325 Blog

Hey Jess! Hope you're having a good week! What did you think of this week's module? I thought it was a good review and a pretty fun way to remember probability! I got some great ideas for teaching and discussing probability in the future, especially the video about rolling dice. Textbook Reading While students can figure out theoretical probability before experimenting, it can be neat to have them experiment first! They can then compare their results, the experimental probability, to the theoretical probability. This way, they can make their own predictions beforehand and they will have no prior expectation as to what will happen; the comparison afterward can serve as more of a reflection. Do you think it is beneficial to still find the theoretical probability after completing an experiment if they did not find it before? On the Illuminations website, the experiment I explored was "Pandemics: How Are Viruses Spread?" Essentially, the students will manipulate diff...

Hey Jess! I hope you're having a great week! This has probably been my favorite module so far. I remember doing box plots in school, but it has been a while and this module gave a great review! I also always like looking at example lessons, so that is a nice resource to have! Box Plots In the box plot shown to us in the talk over PowerPoint, I personally believe that Class A would be easiest to teach a follow up lesson to. As an estimate, the minimum of this class is around 32, the first quartile around 40, the median around 44, the upper quartile around 50, and the maximum is around 60. This essentially shows us that the tests scores range from 32-60. This may seem large, but it is not nearly as large as the other class, who ranges from around 19 to 100. Knowing that all of the students performed poorly in Class A and had a smaller range of scores, I believe it would be easier to teach them a follow-up lesson and take time to cover areas of the test again. When all of the s...

Generating Meaning This article defines mean, median, mode, and range, and lists struggles that students often have with these topics. It is a great article to help educators effectively teach and define these terms and their uses. Discussing how one number can provide information on the data set and how knowing the mean or average gives you a glimpse at the data helps us to define these things to our students. One thing that really stuck out to me was when the article said, "One word cannot describe everything about a person, but the word can provide a verbal snapshot of information about the person. The number that we find for an average provides a glimpse of the facts  about a data set." That is an exemplary way to define this term to younger students. The article discussed how students struggle with understanding what the mean actually means. They understand the process to find the mean, but not what significance it has or why it is important. When I was in elementary ...

Hey Jess! Hope you had a great week. I really enjoyed this week's module. I'm loving the review of everything we will need to know to help our students. Lost Teeth Video In asking the students to estimate different ranges, the teacher is allowing them to think about how many teeth they believe kids lose at different ages, gaining background information and thinking more deeply about their question. It allows them to make a connection to the number of teeth lost in each grade. The students noticed when things were out of the norm, or outliers. For example, when the two girls are showing their representation and discussing what surprised them, they are surprised that a 1st grader has lost 12 teeth already, as well as there being a 1st grader who has not lost any teeth yet. They were able to analyze the range of their data really well and notice when certain ones had a large range, meaning that there was a significant difference in the number of teeth lost. They were able to fi...