kitchen table math, the sequel: My latest rant

Sunday, December 2, 2007

My latest rant

Chi-square in high school?
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4 comments:

Anonymous said...

I think NCTM throws in things like chi-square to fake rigor.

The fuzzy types want to purge math of numbers and computation. Somethig has to take its place. So they come up and are obsessed with patterns like tesselations, charts, mickey mouse statistics and probability. Statistics usually doesn't go beyond mean, median and mode. Probability is limited to coin tosses and spinners. But it sounds impressive to be claiming to be teaching statistics and probability. But it's all fake. So to counter the mickey mouse charge, they'll throw in chi-square to sound impressive.

December 2, 2007 at 12:29 PM
Barry Garelick said...

The issue of statistics in high school is one that rankles me. It's one thing to have a separate course in stat, which many high schools do, called AP statistics. But statistics is also sneaked into algebra 1 classes where it clearly does not belong. There is much material to cover in the first year of algebra--why dilute it with statistics? I've seen lessons with "real life" problems in which students are asked to find the regression line for data (which they have to look up in the spirit of a real world problem). That time could be spent mastering the basics of linear equations rather than leaving students with the impression that math is an empirical science best approached via statistics because life is too messy to be modeled with algebra.

December 3, 2007 at 3:10 AM
Independent George said...

I think they chose chi-squared because, despite their belief in 'conceptual understanding', you can plug-and-chug a chi-squared test without understanding any of the underlying math. Lord knows that's what I did in freshman biology (where stat 220 was a requirement for bio majors, but wasn't a pre-req for the freshman bio sequence). Hence, you get a real, rigorous, real-world application where you can fake competence.

Contrast that with where most intro stats classes begin: regression analysis and the properties of various distribution curves. Just about everything is expressed as an area underneath a curve (or plane) - which is pretty much the definition of calculus. Which, of course, is exactly why stats is not typically studied in high school except by the advanced students who have already taken AP Calc...

December 3, 2007 at 8:21 AM
Anonymous said...

good job, rwp; thanks.
one never tires of posting
this link. and one has reasons.

December 4, 2007 at 7:38 AM

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