Bones Project English

This project is intended to be a mathematics-science data gathering exercise related to the number of your students who have broken bones.  Teachers or preferably older students will survey classmates to gather information only in their own schools from students who have or have not had broken bones.  The data will be collated by the project coordinator and placed on the Internet for use in classrooms.  This project was originally run by Elinor W. Semel and Dr. Jacalyn Willis in 1997, as one of the first interactive Web survey projects done in New Jersey schools.‌

This project involves many useful processing skills.  First, your students will start by predicting the percentage of students they think have broken bones.  They will break that data down by female and male students.  Second, they will also collect data on the names of bones that are broken by female and male students.  Students will gather both sets of information, use the Internet to transmit this information to the project coordinator, and can then analyze and interpret the final results.  View Tally Sheet to see what information we need.  This document contains detailed information on how to conduct this survey. 

As part of this analysis, students may graph the final results in their classrooms, infer explanations for the results, and arrive at some conclusions.  Lesson plan ideas will be linked, and any ideas you have are welcome!  Please contact the project coordinator, Elinor W. Semel, via email with ideas: esemel@comcast.net.  View lesson plan ideas.  When our data collection is complete, information will be broken down by gender, age, bone type, and location so your students can analyze the final results.