Real World Statistics

I'm sure at some point in your learning career, you have been in a lecture/class about probability and statistics.  You've probably even looked at the probability of rolling a certain number on a 6-sided die.  

If your experience with statistics is anything like mine, a teacher at some point in your life said something like "if we were to roll this 10 times, what is the probability? What about 20 times? If we could roll it 100, 200, or 1000 times, what would it look like?"

So teachers wanted you to make conjectures about the probability after 100, 200, or 1000 trials, but told you it was not realistic for us to roll a dice 100, 200, or 1000 times in class.  

In this age of technology, it is VERY realistic for that to happen. We have apps on our iPad, Promethean Boards, or online that will roll a dice how ever many times we want AND it will keep up with the data and show you how the probability changes as the number of trials increases (Dick & Hollebrands, 2011).  

Statistics is all about REAL WORLD data. If is really happening outside of our classrooms, then we need to make phenomena observable inside our classrooms if possible.  Technology is a great way to do that!

Now, it is important to learn to calculate statistical measures by hand--YES! But, I think it is more important to understand the meaning behind those statistical measures. Most of the time, real world data isn't going to be sets of 10 points that are easily calculated.  They are probably going to be messy since random data rarely spits out nice neat integer points.   By using technology to calculate statistical measures, students are able to focus on the reasoning, sense making, and WHY we do what we do--instead of focusing on the calculations (Dick & Hollebrands, 2011).   

So, next time you plan a statistics unit, you might want to see how you can incorporate technology in a way that it transforms your teaching and allows your students to take mathematical ACTION instead of just using it for just conveyance.  

Resources: 
Dick, T. P. & Hollebrands, K. F. (Eds.). (2011). Focus in high school mathematics: Technology to support reasoning and sense making. Reston, VA: National Council of Teachers of Mathematics.