Week 5

Formulas, formulas, formulas. Today was another day we spent working with Excel. Excel is such a great product for people who are afraid of working with formulas or who want to have some extra help. There are so many great features of excel which make figuring out formulas so much easier and less cumbersome than determining the value of of the formulas using a pencil and paper, or even the use of a calculator. The formula for the t-score should have been very intense if we were not utilizing the capabilities of Excel. I enjoy working with an excel spreadsheet for this purpose and I hope that all the people in our program can appreciate this. The computations could be done without its help, but would just take so much more time. I hope we get a new formula next week.

Correlation

WOOO HOO! Formulas. This past week we started discussing the correlation of statistics. We explored correlation tables and while we were looking at them I was thinking how great this lesson could have been if there would have been a SMART board. As we were going through it, we could have been highlighting the rows and columns pertain to the information in an excel spreadsheet and their intersection would have become more clear. Sometime visuals, like tables, aren't visual enough for visual learners. They need the difference to be highlighted so it stands out from the rest of the data. We are currently in the process of getting a SMART board for our department and I would be definitely suggest this to the AP Stats teacher.

Last week I was a little disappointed that we weren't able to finish the calculations of the Spearman formula on the excel sheets. Hopefully we will be able to continue them this week, while it is over the head of most people through the symbols alone. I look forward to doing some more calculations this week with T-Tests.

Week 3

This week we have continued our discussion of measures of central tendencies as well as the z-score. I really enjoy talking about these because it helps students become more critical of the statistics they are presented. Using the measures of central tendencies and the z-score, I encourage my students to examine flyers and adds to Gauge if the message they are being presented is accurate. This fosters their development as an analytical world participant. This also increase their core content knowledge by requiring them to select a point of view and express their ideas orally or on paper, which fits the NCTM standards. Similarly, the project we were asked to complete for class by comparing pre- and post-test scores of a study for 6 different test. I hope that people in our class are not feeling as overwhelmed. When we start bringing the equations aspect of stats, that is when I love it. Give me a good equation any day! We'll see what we get this week.

Central Tendency

Mean, median, and mode are the three measures of central tendency and something I discuss with my students, in all of my classes. Students have seen these statistical measures the most throughout their math careers. The mean is the most familiar to people because they know it's addition and subtraction. These can also be determined on a graphing calculator. Taking this class had encouraged me to examine how I can utilize the graphing calculator more in my classroom. Throughout the year we do sections on statistics within a chapter, and I would be interested to see how the students would handle utilizing the graphing calculator more. I guess we will see how it goes.