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Problem Solving June 2004 (v 28.4)
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How Many Lights, Windows, and Doors? GRADES K–2
Ask students to count and record the number of doors, windows, and
lights they have in their house. (Assign the selection of items to be
counted based on the ability of your students.) In doing so, you will
be giving students opportunities to collect, organize, and record
familiar data.
When you give directions for the activity, clarify
which types of doors (closet doors, sliding doors, cabinet doors,
etc.), windows, and lights (ceiling fan lights, lamps, etc.) the
students should count.
Let students know that part of this homework
assignment is to make decisions about how they will collect, organize,
and record the data.
When the students bring the data back to school,
allow the class to decide the best ways to organize all the data
collected for interpretation.
Teachers are encouraged to send examples of how the class decided to organize the data.
Neighborhood Numbers GRADES 3–5
The U.S. Census Bureau has put the 2000 Census on the Internet. The
“Fact Sheet” button opens an input page from the Bureau,
http://factfinder.census.gov. Students can find demographic profiles of
their school neighborhood by entering the school’s address. The
database contains many types of “characteristics” for their
neighborhood. Have the students pick a characteristic (average
household size, for example) and then compare it with another place,
such as Washington D.C. or their own state capital.
An extension for upper grades would be for the
students to draw pie charts of the characteristics for different cities
and then explain what might have caused the differences
Please have students write out their findings and send examples to the ComMuniCator.
Future Jobs GRADES 6–8
The themes of this issue of the ComMuniCator
can be combined as you give your students the opportunity to use the
computer to find statistics on occupation trends and to display this
data in graphs and written analysis. Before the students download data,
they should discuss or write their personal career choices.
Then send them to a web site, such as
http://www.bls.gov/emp/. Three questions are listed at the top of the
page titled “People Are Asking. . .” Each of these questions will link
to information on occupation and industry growth. This data can be used
to emphasize the fact that the job market is always changing. Many of
the jobs available to them were not in existence when their parents
entered the work force. How might the job market change in the future?
Data found on this or other web sites can be
displayed in a variety of graphs and influence their awareness of the
availability of jobs and the necessary preparation for them. The ComMuniCator
staff would like to receive examples of student work and information of
the ways you used this exercise to expand both your students’
mathematical skills and their career awareness.
SAT Scores by States GRADES 9–12
First ask students to download SAT data in Excel format from this site. The SAT data
file includes information for all 50 states concerning the average cost
per pupil, the student:teacher ratio, the estimated average teacher
salary, and the percent of students who took the SAT exam for the
1994–1995 school year.
Suggest that students work with a partner to
determine how California (or another state of their choice) compares to
other states with respect to any variable of interest. Remind students
to plot the data and to include summary statistics for center and
spread to justify their solution.
Next, students determine the relationship between
SAT score and the cost variable that they think is the best predictor
of average SAT scores, including an appropriate scatter plot and linear
model to support their work.
Finally, let’s suppose that administrators decide
to focus on raising the average SAT score. According to these data,
have students decide what is the best thing to do to try to raise a
state’s average SAT score according to this data.
Teachers are encouraged to send examples of student work and solutions to the ComMuniCator.
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This Page was last updated: Wednesday, May 12, 2004 at 10:49:33 AM
This page was originally posted: 5/12/2004; 10:45:07 AM.
Copyright 2008 cmcmath
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