Prove It. Using Probability and Statistics as Tools Outside of the Classroom

I always enjoy the time of year when we get to statistics in the classroom. Yes, it is a signal that the school year is almost over, but it also is a wonderful breather for the students who just survived their introduction to basic algebra. From the perspective of my students, they are done having to solve complex problems and remember multiple strategies to find their solutions, and can instead be given a list of random numbers with their only goals being to find the one in the middle, the one that shows up the most, or how far apart the biggest and smallest number are from each other. The rigor definitely drops around this time, but that only means that it makes room for me to inject some more meaningful math into their work.

After coming across Dr. Frances Harper’s website surrounding teaching mathematics for social justice, I was amazed thinking about the weight that might accompany these lessons. Giving my students data that carries meaning with it would help the lesson stick far more and would naturally lead to deeper levels of thinking and analysis. Yes, you just found the mean of all of these numbers, but what does that say about what’s going on in this area of the country? So you found the mode of this data set, but what story does that tell about the people in this situation? It feels like this transforms the assignment, where it isn’t a math lesson anymore, but a social justice lesson that we are using math to verify.

The students at my school are predominantly black, and many are more than willing to speak up when it comes to social justice issues that happen across the country. I can use my knowledge of my students and content (Hill & Ball, 2009) to use data from an issue that I know they would respond to, such as investigating racial profiling at traffic stops in Chicago. We would use probability to find if this data, scaled down into more manageable numbers instead of the millions that live in Chicago, shows signs of racial profiling.

Statistics also provides an excellent opportunity to spiral back to some content the students had trouble with in the beginning of the year. One of the biggest challenges early in the year is getting around the conversions between fractions, decimals, and percents. When we get to probability, many of the problems have us doing these exact calculations. We have all heard of the problems with the different colored marbles in a bag. We can use the amount of marbles we have to make part-to-part ratios or part-to-whole ratios. We can then use that information to create percentages or decimals. “If there are 6 white marbles out of our total of 30, what percent of our marbles are white?” It is great to see how far students have come at this point, and remind them to think back to the first few weeks of school when they were struggling with these concepts.

Harper, F. (n.d.) social justice math. FrancesHarper.com. https://francesharper.com/social-justice-math/

Hill, H., & Ball, D. L. (2009). The curious - and crucial - case of Mathematical Knowledge for Teaching. Phi Delta Kappan, 91(2), 68–71

Wix. Analyzing the data [Photograph]. Wix. https://static.wixstatic.com/media/8cd0b216d6dd4d52bd46d3afbb8cf020.jpg/v1/fill/w_525,h_350,al_c,q_80,usm_0.66_1.00_0.01,enc_auto/8cd0b216d6dd4d52bd46d3afbb8cf020.jpg

Wix. Chart analysis [Photograph]. Wix. https://static.wixstatic.com/media/32890b185ed74b51acc3220220b3b961.jpg/v1/fill/w_525,h_350,al_c,q_80,usm_0.66_1.00_0.01,enc_auto/32890b185ed74b51acc3220220b3b961.jpg

Wix. Classroom lecture [Photograph]. Wix. https://static.wixstatic.com/media/31d0a93857b149b5ab12ec952dde0516.jpg/v1/fill/w_525,h_350,al_c,q_80,usm_0.66_1.00_0.01,enc_auto/31d0a93857b149b5ab12ec952dde0516.jpg