MET Summit Conference

November 2 and 3, 2001

Tyson's Corner, VA

Many thanks to those of you who participated in our session: Teaching Statistics to High School Teachers.  Special thanks to my "co-star" Chris Franklin of the University of Georgia.

This page is intended for those who want additional information or who left their conference folders behind in the hotel room.  Please accept that this is an "informal" document and not a "publication".  The reason is that not all i's and t's have been dotted and crossed, respectively.  Even worse, perhaps not all references are up-to-date.

Abstract

Although the intersection between Statistics and Mathematics is quite broad, there is sufficient "extra-mathematical" content in Statistics to make it extremely challenging to develop a curriculum that will adequately prepare a teacher to teach both math and Statistics. In this presentation, I will present some examples of this "extra-mathematical" content and show how it is taught to current and future teachers at UCLA.

I will present some examples and lessons from a course offered by the UCLA Department of Statistics intended for advanced high school Statistics teachers.  This course typically attracts teachers  who are confident with the mathematical content of an AP Statistics level course but are uncomfortable and unfamiliar with applying the mathematical theory to real data. I will also report on the UCLA Mathematics Content Program's course to prepare future elementary, middle-school, and high school teachers.  This  program, which closely follows MET guidelines,  is for teachers under-prepared to teach mathematics and offers a data analysis course intended as a "first course" for future Statistics teachers.

Slides

Here are slides from the talk.  There is a big gap in the slide-show during which I presented the...

Case Study

Can parents who work around lead inadvertantly increase their children's blood lead level? An examination of data from a 1982 study.

Software Resources for Teaching Statistics

A quick list of some software that I have some experience with that you might consider.

Preparing Teachers

Turn to the AP Statistics curriculum .  Teachers prepared to teach  this  well will be well prepared indeed.

 My own course, Data Analysis for High School Teachers, is offered every Fall on Tuesday evenings through UCLA Extension.  It is, however, an "in-service" course intended for teachers who have taught at least one year of AP Statistics.