Overview
& Instructions: The goal of this activity
is to have you think about how mathematical ideas hide in the discussion of
various topics that interest you. You
will use a database to find excerpts of relevant articles that are full of
statistics (and therefore mathematical ideas).
After choosing and reading an excerpt you find interesting, you will
examine what the statistics convey.
1.
Go to the
Highline library’s web page, at http://flightline.highline.ctc.edu/library/
and click on the words “Library Databases.”
2.
Find the
link to the “Matter of Fact” database, and click on it to access the
database.
3.
Talk with
your partner to find a topic that interests both of you.
Search the database to find statistics that are closely related to your
area of interest. You may
want/need to read several excerpts and make several searches to find
information you particularly like.
4.
Print out
two copies of the excerpt you found, but NOT the article they came from.
[Each
member of the group should do the following steps on his or her own.]
5.
On a
separate sheet of paper, write two sentences describing your reactions to
information presented in the article.
6.
Skim the
excerpt again, and then list three statistics that provoked the reactions you
described in step 5.
7.
For each
of the three statistics, use sentences to explain what the data means.
In other words, what important things are the numbers telling you?
8.
Sketch
diagrams or some other visual representations that could help someone else
understand the statistics you described in task 7 above.
9.
Whenever
you’re faced with statistics, it is always a good idea to ask questions about
the numbers. Write down two
concerns you have about the way some of the statistics were obtained or are
being interpreted. Do you have any
reason to suspect some of the data is wrong?