Anna-Marie Fergusson (The University of Auckland) presented a workshop and webinar on Statistical Reasoning with Data Cards.

“Using data cards in the teaching of statistics can be a powerful way to build students’ statistical reasoning. Important understandings related to working with multivariate data, posing statistical questions, recognizing sampling variation and thinking about models can be developed. The use of real-life data cards involves hands-on and visual-based activities.”

Anna’s work using physical data cards and digital technology supports pedagogy required to effectively teach statistical reasoning. This talk presented material from the Meeting Within a Meeting (MWM) Statistics Workshop for Mathematics and Science teachers held at JSM Chicago (2016) which can be used in classrooms to support teaching statistical thinking and reasoning, key teaching and learning ideas that underpin the activities were also discussed.

Download the webinar accompanying files

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Are your students ready for an on-line statistical modeling challenge for maths week!? Expose your students to future careers that will be found at the intersection of data, visual arts and modelling.

Anna Martin has created a word difficulty ranking generator, students can gather data to try and model and predict a ‘readability score’. Statistics teachers if you would like to find out more background about the challenge visit Anna’s website.

How will the challenge run?

Monday to Tuesday

Students test their own words through the on-line text analyser, record data from these tests, and try to develop a way to predict the readability score. They should make some notes/diagrams for their model and use these to predict readability scores for the first set of reserved words.

Wednesday to Thursday

Students have access to check the first set of reserved words. They enter the readability score they would predict for each reserved word, and see how this compares to the actual readability score. This should help them refine their prediction model.

Friday

Students have access to check the second set of reserved words. They enter the readability score they would predict for each reserved word, and see how this compares to the actual readability score. They should only do this once (i.e. this should be their final evaluation of the model).

Keen to give it a go?

Here’s the place to send students: http://mathstatic.co.nz/predictive-text-challenge