Course Guide - USAID Teacher Education Project

Read through the plans for this week's three sessionsWeeklong Overview:Session 1 begins by revisiting the work students did with line plots (recording theletters in their names) in order to discuss frequency tables and the range of the data.Note that when they created their original bar graph from categorical data in the firstclass session, the order of the bars was not important.However, when dealing with numerical data on a line plot, the resulting bar graphshould show the "shape" of the data. They also will consider data sets where themedian is not a number in the data set, which will lead them to ask if the median of adata set of whole numbers needs to be a whole number.Session 2 will address the measure of central tendency that most students willprobably recall: the arithmetic mean or what tends to be called the "average."Although calculating the mean usually means doing division, there is a manipulative,more visual model that students can use to explore this topic.This will be an opportunity to explain that mean, median, and mode are all types of"averages" because they denote the "middle" of a data set. Depending on the data'scontext, one of these measures may be more useful than the others whencommunicating data. This is why statistics (both in research and in the media) need tobe considered carefully, with the reader noting which measure of central tendency thewriter is using.Session 3 is the last session of the entire course. This will be a time to reflect on boththe mathematical content students learned and the way that content was presented.There will be a handout for students to write out their thoughts. Then, because groupwork and full class discussions have been emphasized in this course, the reflectionprocess will be 1) individual written reflection, 2) small group discussion, and 3)whole class discussion.This session also includes a post-assessment for students to complete.