[matthew.schneidman]

I teach 6th grade math at a charter school in the Bay Area and have been working with my students on statistics these past few weeks. I think I’ve been overthinking my unit – there’s too much going on and too little time to teach it all. I wrote up my unit plan before being told about this website and decided to teach my students about representative samples. I’ve enjoyed teaching them this – although they are no doubt a little confused – but it seems like a logical place to go. I interpreted the standards as a way not just to analyze data but a way for them to create their own statistical questions, collect data, create visual representations of that data, and analyze it. Although a representative sample is a challenging concept to understand, I’m wondering why this is not part of the standard. I’m not going into too much depth with it but it should be intuitive that you cannot take a complete sample of something – you have to ask a smaller group to get information about the larger population. You can use the data from a smaller sample to make inferences about larger samples. They also learn about inferring in ELA class and this provides a great opportunity to extend that skill to another subject.

I would love some feedback on this. Thanks.

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