The central question is to what extent professional practices can serve as meaningful contexts for senior high school students (aged 16 to 17) to help them make connections between mathematics, statistics, science and professional practices. In order to answer this question, we focused on two sub-questions: (1) ‘How meaningful do students find an instructional unit that is based on professional practices in which statistics plays a role?’ and (2) ‘To what extent are students able to show awareness of the connections between mathematics, statistics, science within the instructional unit and professional practices?’. Questionnaires on the opinions of 415 students (388 before and 27 after completing two chapters of the unit) on the educational strategy and student work are used to answer the central question. The analysis of responses to questionnaires shows that students consider an educational strategy based on authentic professional practices meaningful. These results are also confirmed by the findings in the analysis of the second sub-question. The results indicate that an educational strategy based on professional practices can help students make connections between mathematics, statistics, science and professional practices. The purpose of this study is to determine whether senior high school students learn to see the connections between mathematics, statistics, science and some professional practices through an instructional unit based on professional practices in which statistics is used. Statistics is seen here as a possible bridge between mathematics and some of the natural sciences, because many scientists frequently apply statistical and mathematical techniques (Erickson ). Statistics is a mathematical science, but not part of mathematics (Moore and Cobb ), although in most countries statistics is part of the secondary education mathematics curriculum (Gattuso ). Statistics could therefore function as a bridge connecting a part of mathematics with the sciences. 355 wrote ‘We conclude with an argument that statistics should be viewed as a bridge between mathematics and science and should be taught in both disciplines.’ One of their arguments was (p.
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