Experiences

Statistics in primary school

Agnieszka Wojtas

Poland

Maths

Teaching in class

Direct

Statistics - despite very strong connections with reality is not easy subject for teaching.
The reason is that different types of data are used to surveys and child usually receives them from the book. And what is clear, the interest of the student may occur when he/she is involved in the process.
Very good option is to encourage students to conduct questionnaire surveys. But what if the school is small and the there are few responses?

Hence, I had the idea to use for this purpose the dice.
Students working with the dice and filling a specific sheet prepared by the teacher - independently discover the secrets of the dice.
The rules of the game - initially student throws the dice 50 times and saves the number of points every time.
They count how many times they threw 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 and 6
The same exercise is performed with two dices.
They also do the statistical summary of the exercise.
The next step is to work with Excel spreadsheet.

Students enter all the results. They individually use the function "count if" and then draw up bar charts.
After analyzing the results, students make a presentation.

The next step is to bring together in one sheet the results obtained by all students. This shows how the results change depending on number of people participating in the study.

The last step is an individual creation of Gaussian function.

In the summary basic concepts, exercise on pole or wheel diagrams or most well-known normal distribution are practiced.

Depending on the group, you can extend the topic with exercise on diagrams showing temperature changes on different continents.
From my experience, I can say that students master and understand the topic.