ASA Connect

This month, Amstat News celebrates the 20th anniversary of the AP statistics exam. I had no idea grading the exam was such a valuable professional development and networking opportunity!

Of course, you don't have to teach AP statistics or work with the exam to have an impact on K-12 students. How have you worked to get K-12 students interested in statistics?

I have prepared a talk that I have given to a few high school groups (here in the UK, while I am on sabbatical) about statistics.  It was received well by the students.  I am happy to share it with anyone else who is interested in doing this on their own.  Thanks to John Holcomb and ThisIsStatistics.Org for some of the material.  Even just going in and volunteering to share with students what you do as a statistician is a great service to our profession!

Michael

Last week, the high school in our town held a "speed dating with the future" event.  People from many careers are invited and set up at a "station" in the cafeteria for a 2 hour evening time period.  Students are invited to attend, and spend 7 minutes at each station.  Free pizza and soda are available as an enticement.   I had information from the excellent This is Statistics | Statistics jobs are in every corner of the world website as well as copies of the latest US News and World Report job rankings that showed Statistician as the #1 ranked business office job.  Most students had no idea what Statisticians actually do, so I started there correcting misperceptions and planting new information.  7 minutes isn't much, but some took the handouts, and I gave some to the teachers in attendance.   It was fun for me and well worth my time to expose them to something they hadn't thought about, which is really what the evening is all about.

Before retirement, I thoroughly enjoyed presenting an annual session on Cancer Statistics as part of Queen's University Cancer Research Institute's transdisciplinary enrichment program week for selected high school students. The session used the ASA video about statistics jobs, an applied statistics population problem with candy (they got to eat the samples), 3 frontline breast cancer research projects that the students worked on using high school level mathematics, and time at the end to browse issues of magazines like Chance, Significance. The session got good reviews from participants with a wide variety of interests. I think a positive exposure to biostatistics is important, regardless of eventual career pursuit.

Through Career Days, STEM Festivals, after-school classes, and presentations at local schools. Variation, Teddy Grahams, and the Law of Large Numbers -- these things can all be connected and I've used them to help youngsters develop an intuitive understanding of some basic Statistics.

Richard

I used dates on pennies to look at properties of measures of center with 130 sixth graders! I shifted the emphasis from sampling distributions towards vocabulary used in the 6th grade common core curriculum: mean, median, mean absolution deviation, and IQR.  It took two class periods (as opposed to the one I use with college students).  As with my college students, we plotted a histograms of the sample means and the sample medians which served as a reference during their study of statistics.

Some years ago, I was a judge for local science fairs for K-12 students. I gave reviews to the teachers as well as students, and suggested to the teachers that students would benefit from learning a little more about design and statistical analysis in their science classes, to give context. This led to invitations to talk to science classes, since most of the teachers didn't feel comfortable incorporating these ideas themselves.

I had a pretty standard format. I would give a talk a couple of days after the students had a lab where they measured something. I'd ask the kids in front row what they did in lab on Tuesday. (There's always an articulate kid in front row who can explain it clearly.) Then I'd ask one of the kids in back row, rocking on hind legs of chair, what he got as result - then ask kid next to him - there are always a couple of such kids. Then ask why they didn't get exactly the same result! Then I challenge the group to tell me how you can do science if no two people get exactly the same answer, even on a relatively simple experiment in a high school class - do they think scientists always get exactly the same answers? This leads to discussion of causes of experimental variation, ways to control or reduce such variation, and ways to account for it or quantify it. With a little guidance, they can come up with ideas of signal and noise, and how to sort out the "real" signal from chance variation from bad designs. It helps to have some good examples from the field they are studying, especially if the examples are related to the lab they just finished. 

 Health Statistics Day at NCHS, 2016

The first Health Statistics Day workshop was held at NCHS on March 9, 2016. It was a grand success and was much appreciated by the teachers and students. The objective of the workshop was to provide an opportunity to young high school juniors and seniors to learn about the importance of higher education in statistical sciences and its applications in public health.

About 30 juniors and seniors and their teachers from two local high schools participated in a day-long workshop. Ms. Meena Khare (DRM), Mr. Charlie Rothwell (Director), and Dr. Nat Schenker (Deputy Director) welcomed the students, and Dr. Schenker gave an exciting presentation titled “Statistics: A Career Odyssey.” The welcome session was followed up with 6 rotating interactive hands-on group activities organized by various NCHS Data Division experts. The group activities focused on examples related to teens and included discussions or applications on statistical inference, vital statistics, diet and nutrition, environmental exposure, health disparity, and problems with questions in questionnaire design. The workshop ended with a session on “Field Epidemic Detectives,” using recent Ebola experiences as an example. In the closing session, career opportunities at NCHS for students were discussed and certificates of completion were distributed to students and teachers.

 The following ways to help K-12 students get interested in statistics.  In general they have been focused on K-12 teachers rather than students themselves.

• Joined other members of the Central Indiana Chapter of the American Statistical Association (ASA) to present awards for statistical content at the Hoosier Science & Engineering Fair held April, 2016.
• Demonstrated a simplified version of Design of Experiments for the Pre-College Classroom, Indiana Council of Teachers of Mathematics Fall Conference, October 4, 2015.
• Numerous presentations/demonstrations/ panel discussions (usually involving how statistics is used in industry) including:
  • DACTM & MDSTA Fall Conference (Detroit Area Council of Teachers of mathematics/Metropolitan Detroit Science Teachers Association)
  • Michigan Council of Teachers of Mathematics Conference
  • National Council of Teachers of Mathematics Conference (once, long ago)
  • Math and Science K-12 classrooms presentations for teachers I have known

• Two decades ago I was one of the ‘founders’ of Detroit and Ann Arbor Chapter awards at the Southeastern Michigan Science Fair. At this fair, the following are distributed:
  • "Certificates of Recognition" for use basic of statistics—many distributed to encourage students
  • "Certificates of Merit" for more impressive use of statistical methods
  • "Award of Excellence" certificate + a statistical book, e.g., Lady Tasting Tea, for those considered the ‘best’ by a consensus of the judges in either the high school or middle school category

• Developed an presented (about half a dozen times) a 12 hour in-service program for K-12 teachers, “Understanding Variation and Statistics”
• Member of the committee that organized the TEAMS Conference (Teacher Preparation Math/Stat Teacher Education: Assessment, Methods, and Strategies, Oct. 30 – Nov.1, 2003, University of Georgia
• Participated in several ASA education-related committees and workshops (committee names long forgotten)
• Developed a Quality and Productivity Project Prize for K-12 (only given once)
• Macomb Intermediate School District Mathematics Advisory Group

I work at an alternative high school for youth with multiple barriers to success.  Today I worked with a young  man who has expressed interest in being a neuroscientist.  His academics aren't so great, but we had a rich discussion of the idea of false positives and negatives when testing individuals for specific medical conditions.  He was able to grab hold of that idea.  Since it is a small school, we know our students well.  I was able to tailor our discussion toward epidemiology and using statistics to combine information about specific symptoms and make a differential diagnosis.  

I teach AP Statistics to high school students.  Each year in the spring I talk to students in feeder classes and emphasize the relevance and application of statistics.  I use the This Is Stats materials (PowerPoint and videos) as well as articles touting Statistics as one of the fastest growing STEM degrees, and as a highly marketable job skill to help get kids interested in the course.  (In our rural school, I get about 130 students each year taking either AP or regular Statistics.)  Once students are enrolled, the course sells itself: students love that everything they learn has immediate application, they learn to see the world through new eyes, to think critically, to consider both what they can and what they can't see when making sense of data.  Students complete several projects each year, including real statistics work that they get hired to do for a local non-profit. In class, I frequently discuss consulting projects I've worked on so the students see how the statistics concepts and skills they are learning get put to use.  After the course, nearly all my students report Statistics as their favorite math class in high school, and some opt for Statistics as a college major.  This is all great stuff, but the problem I run into is that most colleges don't emphasize statistics.  I wish there were more emphasis on the importance of statistics at the college admissions level, so students felt that what they were learning in high school was valued by their university program.

I redesigned the non-AP statistics course into two semester -long courses.  The first is epidemiology and the second is "Statistics for Social Problems"  Both have a strong service learning component built in.  We took part in NYC's HOPE survey of homelessness and collected data on NY state parole decisions for a local non-profit advocacy group.