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In class activity

Fri, 2010-02-12 11:13 — limako

Yesterday in class, I gave pairs of students a data set and asked them to see if the data enabled them to draw and conclusions. The data set showed results for around 50 people, showing gender, GPA, hours studied per week, and hours slept per week. I had, in a fairly simplistic way, salted each dataset to show a unique trend. I had also added some outliers to the data. I had thought this would be a fairly straightforward activity for the students to construct summary tables showing comparisons of mean and/or median values, bar or pie charts, and scatter plots with regression lines. They found the activity to be more difficult than I had expected.

Now, today, I have to read all the rough drafts from their papers and make comments. It's going to be a long day.

Comments

Fri, 2010-02-12 15:23 — Anonymous

In their defense, I will

In their defense, I will have to say I myself didn't quite comprehend how powerful and useful plots and graphs and means etc until I got into flow, and now it's my livelihood. I don't recall going into depth in the slightest in any of my classes. I somewhat regret not taking a statistics class at this point.

~Laura

Sat, 2010-02-13 02:31 — limako

Unfortunate

I tried to get this stuff built into nearly every one of the Intro Biology labs but, unfortunately, the previous coordinator would turn every activity into a recipe of click-by-click directions that didn't offer the students the challenge of really exploring an interesting data set. And there aren't enough faculty who just give the students data and ask them to try to make sense of it.

I remember a former student who was describing a professor's class that he hated. He said, "All we do it look at graphs! He has a graph out of this paper and a graph out of some other paper and we have to figure out what the graphs mean" -- and he showed me some of them. They were fantastic! Real scientific data, interestingly presented and each one a suitable little puzzle to figure out why the author set it up this way -- why he included these particular data. The more he described how much he hated this class, the more valuable I thought the class probably was. It was all I could do to try to commiserate with my poor student and not laugh at his invective.

I just wish I had made the task about half as complicated -- I was hoping we could have a good, solid experience where at the end of the hour everyone would feel satisfied they understood what they'd done. Instead, about 2/3 of the groups really hadn't found anything and it was pretty frustrating for them. Sigh... I'll know better next time.

--
Steven Brewer