A six-phase instructional strategy can help students develop conceptual understanding of inferential hypothesis testing.
Search Results
Cathy G. Schloemer
A new way to help students understand mutually exclusive and complementary sets.
Catherine Case and Douglas Whitaker
Students use simulations–with physical spinners and a computer applet–to introduce and explore the concept of statistical power.
Chris Bolognese
The treasure hunt takes my classroom to the world and features a variety of approaches, conjecture building, and the use of dynamic geometry software. The problem has been written about extensively (Gamow 1947; Nahin 2016; Shilgalis 1998; Shriki 2011). Here is the problem as I have adapted it for my students.
Rachel Levy
The mathematical concept of slope can be made real through a set of simple, inexpensive, and safe experiments that can be conducted in the classroom or at home. The experiments help connect the idea of slope with physical phenomena related to surface tension. In the experiments, changes in surface tension across the surface of the water, which correspond to greater slopes on the graph, lead to increased motion of the fluid. The mathematical content, targeted to middle school and high school students, can be used in a classroom or workshop setting and can be tailored to a single session of thirty to ninety minutes.
Margaret Cibes and James Greenwood
Short items from the media focus mathematics appropriate for classroom study.
Jamie-Marie L. Wilder and Molly H. Fisher
Our favorite lesson is a hands-on activity that helps students visually “tie” (pun intended) the concepts of rate of change and y-intercept together in a meaningful context using strings and ropes. Students tie knots in ropes of various thicknesses and then measure the length of the rope as the number of knots increases. We provide clothesline, twine, bungee cord, and other ropes found at local crafts, sporting goods, and home stores. We avoid very thin string, such as thread or knitting yarn, because the knots are small and the string length does not change enough to explore a rate of change. A variety of thicknesses is important because this allows for variability in the rates of change.
Scott McClintock
Virtual worlds, such as the one inhabited by the players of World of Warcraft, can serve as sampling grounds for students who are video gamers.
Students analyze a photograph to solve mathematical questions related to the images captured in the photograph. This month the editors consider photographs of African bowls made of recycled telephone wire. The mathematics involves trigonometry, parametric equations and their graphs, and linear regression.
Marla A. Sole
Using bivariate data, students investigate the ingredients in pasta sauce.
