I like good news and today’s post is brimming with it.
The American Statistical Association has a page on their site This Is Statistics called “resources for teaching during social distancing” but really, these digital resources are excellent because they can be used any time!
Statistics Education Web is awesome!
Even if you don’t love statistics like I do, it’s hard to imagine you won’t like the Statistics Education Web (STEW). They have activities for K-12, so whatever the age of your student, there will be something appropriate for them. For example, this activity has students use an online applet to measure their reaction times. They compute median times for each student. They then graph the results from the class using various types of plots. Note that the first link to measure reaction time does not work but the other three do.
Adaptation for remote learning and homeschooling
The above activity mentions other students in the class but what if you are learning at home?
- Have your student email the link for computing reaction time to friends and family. Ask them to send you 3-5 reaction times.
- Use your social media to contact friends or followers and ask them to reply with three reaction times.
Why I Like It
Good statistics education is hands-on. This activity has students collect data on themselves, combine it with classmates and use in their calculations.
Good statistics education, like all good mathematics education, is repetitive. There, I said it. There’s a lot of complaining about repetition being rote memorization, but the fact is that people remember very few things they’ve only heard once. If you use The Online Reaction Time Test from the assignment, students will get 5 measurements. The average is computed for you but you have to figure out the median yourself.
