She has taught for 32 years and serves on the state Board of Education's Advisory Council for Mathematics and Science. I watch my students debate how much taller fourth graders are than first graders, I am struck by their intuitive use of significant features of the data. I found the middle height for each and just subtracted. These students are exploring ideas involving maximum, median, and mode. They are considering what features to use to tell what is typical of the two groups so they can be compared.
Students support their ideas with information in the data itself.
They are developing ways to think about data that will lead to deep understanding of more formal statistics. The rich mathematical discussions in my class are an outgrowth of my participation in professional development that focused on inquiry-based teaching and the big ideas we should be teaching. But since high-stakes testing arrived, professional development meetings often focus on how to improve test scores, not on how to improve learning. Testing involves sampling student knowledge. It is fragmented and only examines learning outcomes.