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Voices of Innovation Speaker Series:

Software as a Learning Context:

The Case of TinkerPlots and Statistical Reasoning

Andee Rubin
TERC Senior Scientist

Wednesday, May 7, 2008, 11:00-12:00PM

Nortel Workshop at the Friday Institute

Sophisticated statistical tools have made data analysis accessible to an increasingly wide variety of people, from scientists to students, demographers to historians. Yet, statistics is still generally regarded as a difficult – if not impossible – topic to understand. Surely technology should be able to support the development of students’ statistical reasoning as well as the analysis of data. At least two projects in the last decade have taken on this challenge and designed educational environments that are both a tool that can carry out statistical analyses and a tool box with which budding analysts can try out and compare a variety of approaches to a statistical situation.
Andee Rubin will discuss TinkerPlots, a statistics education tool that can be used as early as middle school and at least through high school. While she will describe the educational model that TinkerPlots is based on and demonstrate some of its features, she will focus in particular on the ways in which the software acts as a learning context and share several examples of students and teachers exploring statistical concepts using the TinkerPlots tool box.

Andee Rubin, Senior Scientist at TERC, has done research and development in the fields of mathematics, technology, and online learning for over 25 years. She has written curriculum, developed and provided professional development, and designed software and accompanying activities as well as studying how students and teachers develop mathematical reasoning skills. Her research has focused on how students and teachers develop statistical reasoning, how video can be used to introduce ideas of movement over time to middle school students, and how mathematics education can be integrated into informal settings such as zoos, aquariums, and science centers.

In addition, there will be a Brown Bag lunch discussion:
Thursday, May 8, 2008, The Friday Institute Collaboratory Commons, noon-1:15 p.m.

Dr. Rubin will discuss “The Strange Role of Fantasy in Science” for interested faculty, staff and students.
Kids grow up creating worlds of their own, fantastic worlds with no necessary relationship to “reality.” Often these worlds have their own physical laws (e.g. no gravity) and imaginary creatures. And kids love to extend and elaborate them. But in science, fantasy (“imagining”) has a very different status. The most obvious example is in statistical inference: we say, in essence, “imagine that this hypothesis is true,” then proceed to try to prove it wrong. What a strange way we ask kids to reason: create a fantasy but be prepared to decide it’s wrong. Hardly what kids do when they play pirates or space travel.
These thoughts are very young and unbaked, but I would like to discuss the idea of fantasy and imagining in scientific reasoning – and how we might engage students in that process. Please join in the discussion!