Report

  • This report presents research, materials development, and dissemination activities conducted in year 2 of the Project (May 1, 1991, to May 1, 1992). In general, most efforts in year 2 were devoted to research activities in accordance with the original Project plan. This plan called for completion of data-collection for the research component of the Project by the end of year 2, with year 3 expected to be devoted to writing of research reports and development of training materials. [Research activities in year 2 were for the most part a direct continuation of work done in year 1. To enable the reader to understand the current status of the Project (as opposed to what was done in year 2 only), we have chosen, wherever appropriate, to combine descriptions of year 1 and year 2 activities]

  • This is the final report of "A Program to Improve Quantitative Literacy in the Schools," a three-year project of the American Statistical Association (ASA) with assistance from NCTM completed the final year of development on September 30, 1987. This Final Project Report is submitted in compliance with regulations issued by the National Science Foundation. The purpose of this Final Project Report is to provide educators and other interested readers with a technical summary of the activities and to document the performance of the Quantitative Literacy (QL) Project. The report includes an Introduction, an Executive Summary, four main Sections, and an Appendix. The first section lists publications that address the activities of the project and provides impressions and points of view from numerous writers. The next section presents a list of individuals who assisted with the project. This list includes co-investigators, evaluators, programmers, and others associated with Quantitative Literacy. The third and most extensive section provides a technical description of the project and the project results. The final section contains materials produced by the project, some that were specifically required in the award document and others that were developed because they were considered to be useful to the project. The section is composed of reports, summaries, statements, forms, guidelines, and diagrams and charts regarding the activities of the project.

  • A quasi-experimental design with two experimental groups and one control group was used to evaluate the use of two books in the Quantitative Literacy Series, Exploring Data and Exploring Probability. Group X teachers were those who had attended a workshop on the use of the materials and were using the materials during the 1986-1987 school year. Group Y teachers were those who were trained by the Group X teachers and were using the materials during the 1986-1987 school year. Teachers of Group Z, the control group, were teaching similar classes from the same schools as teachers of Groups X and Y. A pretest was administered to all three groups in November 1986. A March Test was administered to the two experimental groups. A May Test, posttest, was administered to all three groups. In addition, teachers maintained daily logs of the amount of instructional time allocated to mathematics and the amount of instructional time allocated to the Quantitative Literacy materials. All teachers were requested to complete a questionnaire at the end of the study. A total of sixty teachers from two states, Wisconsin and Connecticut, agreed to participate in the study. A complete set of data was received from 42 teachers--7 in Group X, 25 in Group Y, and 10 in Group Z. The results indicate that using the Quantitative Literacy materials resulted in students learning approaches and techniques for describing data sets and means of computing probabilities. On the May Test, the scores of the Quantitative Literacy classes, Groups X + Y, were significantly higher than those of the control group. There were no significant differences in the student scores between Group X and Group Y. Thus, the form of training that a teacher had received did not affect student test scores. Teachers varied in the amount of time allocated to the materials and how that time was distributed. Some used the materials over an extended period of time and integrated the Quantitative Literacy materials with their regular content. Other teachers taught the materials as a unit over a relatively short period of time, one or two months. Teachers felt the materials were fairly easy to use. However, there did not seem to be significant differences in teacher beliefs that could be attributed to group membership.

  • A project goal was to affect change in the secondary mathematics curriculum and the styles and methods of instruction. The project was based on three fundamental assumptions: (1) The prevailing style of presentation in the secondary mathematics curriculum is too narrow and formalized. We must broaden the curriculum and encourage active learning styles which stress experimental and exploratory approaches to learning. (2) The role of the teacher is absolutely crucial to affect change in the curriculum and styles of instruction. The teacher's attitude about what is important and how it should be taught is the most important factor. (3) Statistics should be presented in a coherent fashion and must be approached through problems, not just techniques. The role of statistics in society and statistics across the curriculum are important objectives of statistical education.

  • This project combines a large-scale implementation plan with a plan for research and evaluation in statistics education to address teacher education needs in statistics for elementary teachers. The overall goal is: To develop and implement a comprehensive program to teach and to research the teaching and learning of statistics in the elementary grades (1 - 6) throughout the state of North Carolina. This includes: (a) Developing a statistics professional development curriculum designed for inservice education of elementary teachers. (b) Assisting elementary teachers in using statistics and data analysis as an organizing framework for the elementary mathematics curriculum and as a tool for integrating mathematics with other disciplines, particularly science and social studies. (3) Involving University and College faculty participating in TEACH-STAT as a Community of Research Practitioners (CORP) in school-based program evaluation and research.

  • This paper discusses a curriculum, called Reasoning Under Uncertainty (RUU), which emphasizes reasoning and learning-by-doing as methods for helping students understand the hows and whys of statistics.

  • This packet is a collection of several separate papers from ICOTS III. It includes the following papers: - A Complementarity Between Intuitions and Mathematics, by Manfred Borovnik (ID 811) - What's Typical? Children's Ideas about Average, by Janice R. Mokros, Susan Jo Russell, Amy Shulman Weinberg and Lynne L. (ID 804) - The loss of intuition - A lesson for the school teacher?, by F. R. Jolliffe (ID 809) - Assessment of the understanding of statistical concepts, by F. R. Jolliffe (ID 812) - Exploring the Stability of Students' Conceptions of Probability, by Joan Garfield and Robert delMas - The Use of Multiple Items to Identify Misconceptions in Probabilistic Reasoning, by Robert delMas and Joan Garfield (ID 471) - Use of the arithmetic mean: An investigation of four properties issues and preliminary results, by Marjorie Roth Lean and Judith Zawojewski (ID 805) - The origin of inconsistencies in probabilistic reasoning of novices, by Clifford Konold, Alexander Pollatsek, Arnold Well and Jill Hendrickson (ID 810) - A longitudinal study of pupils' probability concepts, by David Green (ID 807) - Use of the Chance-Concept in Everyday Teaching - Aspects of a Socially Constituted Epistemology of Mathematical Knowledge, by Heinz Steinberg (ID 808) - Learning about sampling: Trouble at the core of statistics, by Andee Rubin, Bertram Bruce and Yvette Tenney (ID 806)

  • This report presents results of tests undertaken with English school pupils aged from 7 to 14 years during 1986 and 1990. This first edition of the report concentrates on presenting basic statistical analyses of the various tests carried out. A future edition will include more detailed results for those questions concerning spatial distribution which are not yet fully analysed, together with more sophisticated analyses.

  • The VIEW project's goal for the first year was to investigate and elucidate the concept of Video-Based Labs, an approach to using video technology as a source of scientific and mathematical data. Our belief in the value of VBL is based on several hypotheses about physical and social characteristics of video as a medium.

  • The differential effect of two activity-based instructional treatments on subjects' concepts of probability was investigated.

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