Editors’ Note: Fall 2024
With the fall season upon us and the rhythms of the school year in motion, we are excited to share this issue of Statistics Teacher. New school years, as with new seasons, offer opportunities to connect with one another, share new ideas and resources, and reflect upon our continued growth and practice. We are delighted to have Statistics Teacher join you in this journey and hope you find this issue’s many resources and ideas timely and valuable.
This issue is notably special—it is the last published with Christine Franklin serving as managing editor. Throughout her career, Chris has served an integral role in transforming K–12 statistics education. As lead author of the GAISE Pre-K–12 and SET reports, past chair of the ASA-NCTM Joint Committee on Curriculum in Statistics and Probability, and inaugural American Statistical Association K–12 Statistical Ambassador, Chris has been a leader in supporting teachers, teacher educators, and the inclusion of statistics in K–12 education. She has left a lasting impact on statistics education, and it has truly been an honor to have worked with her. We wish Chris much joy and happiness as she embarks on her next adventures in retirement.
At the same time, we welcome Kaycie Maddox as the new ASA K-12 data science education outreach team director. Serving for more than 20 years as a middle and high school mathematics teacher and more than 18 years as a mathematics specialist for Northeast Georgia Regional Educational Service Agency, Kaycie has extensive experience collaborating with and supporting mathematics educators in teaching statistics.
In this issue of Statistics Teacher, we share three articles, one lesson plan, and three highlights from the ASA-NCTM Joint Committee on K–12 Education in Statistics and Probability.
In the first article, “Statistics, Data Science Education: Key for Future of High School Mathematics,” NCTM President Latrenda Knighten and NCTM Past President Kevin Dykema invite us to reflect on future implications for statistics and data science education by highlighting a new publication, High School Mathematics Reimagined, Revitalized, and Relevant. They note the publication’s focus on offering students more meaningful experiences in high school mathematics and discuss ways in which the publication proposes statistics and data science processes can help accomplish that.
The next two articles offer useful strategies and resources for promoting student discussion and participation. In “Encouraging Equitable Participation in Ethical Data Science Discussions,” Jordan Register shares strategies for promoting equitable participation in classroom discussions. Although Register discusses these strategies within the context of a secondary introductory ethical data science course, you can adapt the strategies for other classroom contexts and grade levels in which you would like to encourage a sense of belonging and equitable participation among students with diverse identities, perspectives, and experiences.
In the next article, “Making Sense of Data Visualizations: A Toolkit for Supporting Student Discussions,” Emily Thrasher, Hollylynne Lee, Bruce Graham, Matthew Grossman, and Gemma Mojica share a new framework for supporting student discourse and sense making of complex data visualizations often used in media and society. They also share numerous resources and examples, including several questions and interesting data visualizations you can use with students across multiple grade levels.
After these articles, we suggest reading the three featured highlights from the ASA-NCTM Joint Committee on K–12 Education on Statistics and Probability. This new Statistics Teacher feature focuses on the committee’s work and areas of particular interest to all of us in statistics and data science education. In this issue, Amy Hogan, Susan A. Peters, and Hollylynne Lee
share resources you can use with students and to support your continued learning in teaching. One is about statistics-based videos (Against All Odds) that can be used in high school courses, while another discusses the Census at School site, where you can access (and even collect) real data on students in grades 4–12. The last resource describes a free online platform (InSTEP) for educators to learn to teach statistics and data science across multiple subjects.
In the lesson plan section, Courtney Rubio shares a lesson exploring the association between gender and the sports students prefer to watch. The lesson allows for multiple entry points and solution strategies including numerical approaches such as calculating relative frequencies, graphical approaches such as creating mosaic plots or segmented bar graphs in an applet, and inferential approaches such as the chi-squared test of independence. The lesson also describes how to sequence student solutions in a large group discussion to emphasize the connections and distinctions between various methods for analyzing relationships between categorical variables.
Throughout this season and future ones to come, we look forward to enjoying this journey together!
Trena L. Wilkerson
Statistics Teacher Article Co-Editor
Baylor University
Jennifer L. Green
Statistics Teacher Article Co-Editor
Michigan State University
Catherine Case
Statistics Teacher Lesson Plan Co-Editor
University of Georgia
Charlotte Bolch
Statistics Teacher Lesson Plan Co-Editor
Midwestern University
