Asher Palmer EDSC 304 Slice 1 Just the Stats, Ma’am Asher Palmer EDSC 304 Slice 1

Who am I? I’m a future Math teacher. I believe that understanding statistics can be very beneficial for students. Many times we hear statistics on the news or during infomercials and take them at face-value. Students need to be more aware of what the underlying messages the people using statistics are trying to say.

CA Math Standard Advanced Placement Probability and Statistics – Standard 14.0 Students organize and describe distributions of data by using a number of different methods, including frequency tables, histograms, standard line graphs and bar graphs, stem-and-leaf displays, scatterplots, and box-and-whisker plots.

Activity Students will be broken up into groups and each take the role of a statistician researching population trends for a state of their choosing. There will be a sign-up sheet so there won’t be duplicates of projects. The end product will be a presentation with appropriate graphs with data from the past 20 years and projecting targets up to 5 years in the future. After which, students will create “catch-phrases” based on the data from their state, such as, “5 children are born every minute in California”.

Questions What are statistics? How do we use statistics in the world around us? What is the benefit from having statistics?

Definitions of Statistics Practice of collecting, organizing, describing, and analyzing data to draw conclusions from the data to apply to a cause. The science of the collection, organization, and interpretation of data.

How do we use statistics? And what are the benefits? If we study a large group of people (rats, pigeons, etc.), we generate a lot of information and we have to make sense of it. The most common way of reducing the number of data so we are not swamped with too much information is to find the average score. There are several distinct averages, each computed differently. A second use of statistics is to allow us to evaluate the similarities and differences of groups.

The Story behind a Statistic Number of African-Americans born each minute = Total # of African-Americans born in a Year Number of Minutes in a Year which equals 524160

Student Goals Create a presentation of the population trends of your chosen state. Show how to create the statistics included. Please include as much demographic information as possible: Birth rate, mortality rate, average age, the distribution of age, gender and race of the population. Extra credit will be given to statistics done above the minimum required. Create “catch-phrases” to describe your state. E

Evaluating Statistics How credible do you believe the statistics are in this presentation? What is the message behind these statistics? Population Growth

Resources Definition of statistics - www.marketresearchterms.com/s.php and en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statistics Population Growth - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b98JmQ0 Cc3k Images are from Google Image Search - http://www.google.com/webhp?hl=en