Just to get a good fight started, I'll stick my neck out and say
something about what I'd like to see happening in the schools re
statistics -- or NOT happening. What I think would be
counterproductive is moving the intro. stats. course to the high
school. Instead, what I'd like to see is lots of experiences for kids
that build their intuition for statistical and probabilistic thought.
I like the stuff developed by the Quantitative Literacy Project, for
example. I believe there is now a follow-up project that is trying to
integrate statistical topics into the more traditional content of high
school mathematics, rather than making it an add-on or a separate
course. I'm currently working on a project that is writing textbooks
for high school mathematics, and I have been trying to integrate
statistics into this as well. For example, right now I'm going from
models like
y=a+bx
to
y=a+bx+cz
and talking about how you might graph such a thing (geometry) and
simultaneously looking at trivariate data and discussing the problems
of visualization as the number of variables increases. Looking at
such linear models will lead to solving systems of linear equations
and eventually some simple linear programming.
--_ | | Robert W. Hayden | | Department of Mathematics / | Plymouth State College | | Plymouth, New Hampshire 03264 USA | * | / | (603) 968-9914 | ) (603) 535-2489 L_____/ hayden@oz.plymouth.edu