The student work that I brought in for Week 4 was an assignment that my students had to do on identifying a bar graph and decribing the mean, median, mode and range for a set of data. My Mentor Teacher bought a pet for the class (a Geko) and the students had the opportunity to submit a name that they thought would be a good name for the class pet. Of the names that were submitted, my Mentor Teacher chose 4 that the class would vote on. As part of the whole group activity on bar graphs, my mentor teacher took the votes and turned it into a bar graph that the whole class could see on the board. The names that the students had to choose from we Gabriel, Glen, Geffrey and George. Of the four names, Gabriel won. Also as a part of this the students were introiduced to the x and y axis on a graph. They had to correctly identify what information was on the x-axis and what information was on the y-axis. The students then went back to their desk and did a worksheet in their Everyday Math Journal on the concepts that were presented. They were asked to construct a bar graph using data from the letters in their classmates names.
After talking with students and going over the activity with the students individually, it seems, for the students I met with, that they understand bar graphs. They understand the vocabulary that was introduced as well. In addition to checking the worksheet they were asked to do, I asked them what the meanings of mean, median, mode and range were without looking at their books. I did this because, I felt that they were able to write the definitions of the vocab words because they were given hints about what the answer should be. They students that I met with were able to describe the words correctly. Also from what I observed there seems to be no gap in student understanding. I also spoke with my mentor teacher about the students he met with. He informed me that they students he met with were also able to complete the tasks successfully as well.
Two potential ways I could advance my students' mathematical understanding are having them explain the significance of a lesson. My mentor teacher gives objectives but it is important that the student knows how to apply what they are learning. The second way would be to ask students what other subjects could bar graphs be applied to. By doing this they are making connections across subjects which is also important. For the students that I met with future tasks in involving finding the mean of various sets of data may be fruitful.
This sounds like a good lesson; to check to make sure that students truly understand the difference between these descriptive statistics, you might ask students to devise a similar scenario, or ask them about another, slightly different scenario and ask how they would analyze it. This seems to be a great opportunity to "do mathematics"; that is, applying the procedure of finding mean or median to a real life scenario, given which one is appropriate given the circumstances. So you might advance their thinking by asking, "What is another scenario or real life situation where you might need to use the mean? Explain how you would use it and how you would compute it."
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