I’m very excited/curious about tomorrow: I’m going to lead about 40 math and science teachers in a data-analysis activities, using one of the Model Eliciting Activities from the University of Minnesota Catalysts for Change Project. (One of our bloggers, Andy, was part of this project.) Specifically, we’re giving them the arrival-delay times for five different airlines into Chicago O’Hare. A random sample of 10 from each airline, and asking them to come up with rules for ranking the airlines from best to worst.
I’m curious to see what they come up with, particularly whether the math teachers differ terribly from the science teachers. The math teachers are further along in our weekend professional development program than are the science teachers, and so I’m hoping they’ll identify the key characteristics of a distribution (all together: center, spread, shape; well, shape doesn’t play much of a role here) and use these to formulate their rankings. We’ve worked hard on helping them see distributions as a unit, and not a collection of individual points, and have seen big improvements in the teachers, most of whom have not taught statistics before.
The science teachers, I suspect, will be a little bit more deterministic in their reasoning, and, if true to my naive stereotype of science teachers, will try to find explanations for individual points. Since I haven’t worked as much with the science teachers, I’m curious to see if they’ll see the distribution as a whole, or instead try to do point-by-point comparisons.
When we initially started this project, we had some informal ideas that the science teachers would take more naturally to data analysis than would the math teachers. This hasn’t turned out to be entirely true. Many of the math teachers had taught statistics before, and so had some experience. Those who hadn’t, though, tended to be rather procedurally oriented. For example, they often just automatically dropped outliers from their analysis without any thought at all, just because they thought that that was the rule. (This has been a very hard habit to break.)
The math teachers also had a very rigid view of what was and was not data. The science teachers, on the other hand, had a much more flexible view of data. In a discussion about whether photos from a smart phone were data, a majority of math teachers said no and a majority of science teachers said yes. On the other hand, the science teachers tend to use data to confirm what they already know to be true, rather than use it to discover something. This isn’t such a problem with the math teachers, in part because they don’t have preconceptions of the data and so have nothing to confirm. In fact, we’ve worked hard with the math teachers, and with the science teachers, to help them approach a data set with questions in mind. But it’s been a challenge teaching them to phrase questions for their students in which the answers aren’t pre-determined or obvious, and which are empirically oriented. (For example: We would like them to ask something like “what activities most often led to our throwing away redcycling into the trash bin?” rather than “Is it wrong to throw trash into the recycling bin?” or “Do people throw trash into the recycling bin?”)
So I’ll report back soon on what happened and how it went.
