Classroom Activities
Beginning of Unit - Team Exploration – Health Surveys
During the first week of this unit, students will work in teams to design and conduct a health survey in their neighborhood. Teams will be responsible for compiling the data they collect and communicating it to the class effectively. This exploration will serve as an introduction to the unit as well as a statistics pre-test to gauge students’ prior knowledge and skill level.
We will begin this activity with a Think-Pair-Share addressing the questions: “What does it mean to be healthy? What does it mean to be unhealthy?” We will work as a class to develop a working definition of health. Students will then work in teams to write ten survey questions that measure the health of a person. They will be required to write both quantitative and qualitative questions. Teams will share their questions and get feedback as to how to revise them. Next we will work as a class to identify a reasonable sample population to represent their neighborhood. Teams will then administer the survey to their identified audience. Teams will reconvene with their data sets and work (with or without technology) to summarize their data graphically. Each team will present their findings to the class. As audience members, students will be expected to rate each presentation on clarity and completeness using a rubric, and these ratings will be coupled with my own assessment to assign a grade to each team. We will conclude the activity with another Think-Pair-Share addressing the questions: “How much of your health is under your own control? What are the major health problems you may face in your lifetime?” as well as any other follow-up questions the class may have. This activity will help me to refine future activities in the unit to better address student ability and interest.
Middle of Unit - Team Practice Problems – Reading a Statistical Report
In the middle of this unit, after we have learned basic statistical methods, teams will be asked to practice applying these methods to various reports on health data sets in Chicago. This activity will serve as an important step in students identifying a focus for their final reports for this unit as described in the teaching strategies section above. Teams will identify a particular health problem of interest and apply appropriate methods to process and summarize the available data. Teams will also present their findings to the class. This activity will serve as mid-unit assessment of student’s progress on applying statistical methods as well as communicating effectively with mathematics to an audience.
I will begin by familiarizing students with the various reports and resources I used in my discussion of Health in Chicago above. Students will then choose a particular health problem that is prevalent in the city of Chicago. Teams will pull the necessary reports that break the prevalence of this problem down in each of the 77 community areas in Chicago. Teams will work to summarize the prevalence of this health problem by calculating all measures of central tendency and dispersion for these 77 data points. They will also interpret the meaning of each of these measures of central tendency and dispersion in context. Teams will then work to graphically represent this set of data by creating all frequency diagrams – they will create a frequency and cumulative frequency table, a cumulative frequency diagram, a box-and-whiskers plot, and a histogram. In each representation, they will identify where their community area of New City falls. Finally, teams will identify at least three factors that they believe could be related to this health problem in the community areas where it is most prevalent. These factors will be the independent variables they investigate in their linear correlation analyses in future activities. Each team will present their findings to the class. As audience members, students will be expected again to rate each presentation on clarity and completeness using a rubric, and these ratings will be coupled with my own assessment to assign a grade to each team.
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