Does Major League Baseball Need a Stats Lesson?

I saw this data in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch last week claiming that the Cardinals are the 6th most expensive team  to see at their home park. (the "FCI" averages all of the columns from this chart together to get an estimate of what a family of 4 would expect to spend at the ballpark.)

I have no problem with the FCI, but I wonder if this chart's reporting of "MLB LEAGUE AVERAGE" is a little off. That row looked suspiciously in the middle to me, and when I counted rows, it was indeed exactly in the middle.

So what's going on here? Is it a misrepresentation of "average," do MLB teams attempt to group themselves symmetrically around this figure, or is it pure coincidence?

Here's the MEAN of those FCI listings by team:

Could the difference between 211.68 (reported in the table as "average") and my calculation of 211.89 be the result of rounding error in the data they used that I don't have access to in this report? Are there 21 rogue cents floating around in their numbers? 

What's this mean for my students?

I think this graphic and table is a good conversation starter for both mean vs. median AND the role of rounding in getting "different" answers. What's the clue that this CAN'T POSSIBLY be the median? Its not listed in the data of course. 

Giving Student Opinion Surveys: Data-Driven SELF Evaluation and Reflection

Being a reflective teacher isn't only about writing - you need to give yourself some data to write ABOUT.

I know that "data-driven evaluation" gets a lot of action from talking heads on any conversation about school reform, and good intentioned teachers and administrators argue both for and against using surveys as evaluative tools for teacher-effectiveness.

The Damage Done by Data-Driven Evaluation http://t.co/O99OmvFu via @wordpressdotcom
— Diane Ravitch (@DianeRavitch) August 25, 2012

I don't exactly know how I stand about student surveys and test data being used on my official tenured evaluation, but I AM here to speak in favor of student surveys for YOUR OWN data and uses. 

I've given a paper or electronic form of this survey for every (nearly) every semester I've taught (I may have missed one out of my 7 years, back when I was still administering them by hand.) Back when the students took the survey on paper (before I had a class set of iPads), they were good to take a glance at, file them away, and make mental notes. I never did anything more with them because as I've written before, entering paper-based data into spreadsheets IS AWFUL.

If you really want to make the time it takes giving this survey to your students worth it, find a way to do it electronically (or make it short enough that you CAN reasonably transcribe the results) so that you can archive the results and analysis trends. 

I was anxious to analyze these results at the end of the semester because when last spring my results were NOT good. They were still acceptable with my AP Stats kids (my students who can "play" the school game the best), but for my other, lower-level courses, the results were disheartening. Nearly every quantitative question was as low I could remember it, and many of the open-ended responses said things like, "argues too much," and "too sarcastic." I went back further through past semesters' results and noticed a trend developing. This was not the teacher I wanted to be. I did a lot of introspection over the summer of how I viewed my role as teacher, re-examined some of my classroom policies, and (no matter what my official professional development plan says) made a goal to have a classroom where kids were comfortable and their teacher was an ally instead of an adversary.

The open ended questions further down this spreadsheet for this semester were very positive and several Algebra 1 kids said they would "recommend his class" (which I can't really remember ever happening on this survey), and that they were going to miss my class.

That makes me feel really good, but because I also have these quantitative numbers to go with that, I know in part their positive responses were because I was 58% more in control of class, was able to give 38% more individual attention, provided a 38% more relaxed atmosphere, and gave 14% more relevant work.

"Why are all those numbers important?"

I can hear you thinking right now.

"I was IN the room, Chuck. I know how my semester went. I know what things I did. I know how good I am. I even keep a journal. What good to me is this extra work?"

The value of doing this is that getting your students' opinions and reflecting on THAT will give you information you cannot gather on your own. When I was reflecting only on my perception of how this crazy, #Ferguson distracted semester went, I was feeling quite discouraged. Yes, some kids will use the surveys as a means to vent all of their frustrations (and that's of some use, too, I think. Even just this semester, I got a "can you fire this teacher" response), and some will use it to sugarcoat everything, but through my years of experience looking at my own survey results, I can tell you with confidence that your students will just tell the truth.

How do I get started?
You've got two options:

1. Make copies of the PDF and have students fill out with pen/pencil (how I started)
1. Pros: 
1. not reliant on technology
2. students don't have to type
2. Cons: 
1. analysis more difficult, particularly over several semesters
2. "I forgot to make copies"/"I ran out of copies"
2. Use the PDF above as a guide and create your own Google Form (how I do it now)
1. Pros:
1. No paper to copy/keep track of
2. Analyzing/observing trends over time
2. Cons:
1. some of my students struggle with persevering through typing the open-ended questions on the iPad

One last note on administering the Google Form:
For the first couple of years, I embedded my Form on a Google site that I often used for class notes or our benchmarking bubble sheet (because I hate scantrons). This year I tried sending my students directly to the form via a shortened link (bitly.com/cbakersurvey), and I had fewer "Where is the survey?" "How do I get to it?" type questions.

Bowling in the Living Room

The older my daughter gets, the more I continue to be amazed at what she's capable of doing (and inspired by what my wife comes up to do with her) during home-school time.

On a random week-day this past September, my 4 year old tracked and generated her own color-coded data chart. This is especially profound for me today because I just got back my semester evals in AP Stats and a couple kids said that the times I sent them out to collect (and then use) their own data were some of the very best, most relevant lessons.

So, my wife could have picked up some colored balls or marbles and counted them in some repeated fashion that my daughter then notated on the chart she was given, but instead, they went bowling in the living room.

A simple toy bowling set we bought a couple of years ago, set up in the living room.

That face... LOL

Which pins did you knock down?

Counting the number of pins after all the trials, then drawing an illustration in her science notebook

This post probably isn't actually for teachers in an early ed or primary classroom. From all of my interactions observing my son's classroom and others in the district I teach, no one has to tell early ed and primary teachers that physical activity and tangible, concrete objects and experiences are critical to students' engagement in and memory of the content they are responsible for learning.

If you are an early ed/primary classroom teacher, let me just continue to encourage you in all of your work encouraging and promoting numerical literacy. Creating and interpreting charts to track, present, and understand data becomes more important year after year as companies increasingly use computers to track data on customer's preferences and habits, waste or excess in financial statements, student achievement on state tests (and how/why they are rising/falling), just to name a few.

If you're a part of my usual audience of middle school and high school teachers, my hope is that you'll take the same lesson I often take myself when I observe my daughter's learning - kids always start out eager to learn. They start out eager to take experiences from play and translate them into a different medium to make sense of what they just did. When everything is new, few things are "boring."

Here's my lesson from today, courtesy of Hey, Beth Baker:

1. Involve your students in creating as often as possible.
2. Take some time out of class to do something. 
3. Keep pushing and seeking exactly what your students are capable of. If its something their passionate about, they'll probably surprise you.
4. Use the normal or mundane things around you in a new way to surprise your students and bring them in.

Getting Google Forms to your Students

I've seen (and done) several trainings and presentations on the power of using Google Forms for rubrics, quizzes, and other assessment, but how to get said Forms to your STUDENTS is an important aspect of the workflow that often gets overlooked or de-emphasized in the course of the training.

WHY DOES IT MATTER?

You can have the greatest Google form/survey in the world, but if you cannot get it yo your audience/students, the form is worthless. When you're using Forms within your Google Apps domain (with other teachers/staff at your school/district), it can be as simple as emailing the live form to everyone on that domain, but the access gets more complicated when students will be using their own Google accounts (or none at all).

WHAT ARE MY OPTIONS?

The solution you choose to send your students your Google Forms will mostly depend on your set-up, but most often you'll have several of these at your disposal.

WITH STUDENT GOOGLE ACCOUNTS ON YOUR GOOGLE APPS 

1. Set up an contact group with your students' Google accounts for each class (done in Gmail or Contacts). Compose an email to the classes you want to submit responses (type the name of that class in the address field) and link to the live form or embed the form in the email with HTML.

2. Create a doc with a link to the live form and share the document with the classes/students you want to submit responses

3. Take the link to the live form and shorten it with a service like bit.ly or tinyurl.com. Put the shortened link on your white/chalk/SMART/Promethean board or projector.

WITHOUT STUDENT GOOGLE APPS ACCOUNTS

1. Set up an contact group with your students' Google accounts for each class (done in Gmail or Contacts). You'll need to ask them for their Google account first. Some may need to set up accounts. Compose an email to the classes you want to submit responses (type the name of that class in the address field) and link to the live form or embed the form in the email with HTML.

2. Create a doc with a link to the live form and share the document with the classes/students you want to submit responses

3. Take the link to the live form and shorten it with a service like bit.ly or tinyurl.com. Put the shortened link on your white/chalk/SMART/Promethean board or projector.

4. Take the link to the live form and post it to your class website

5. Embed the live form on your class website (Process simplified if you use Google Sites)

ON (SHARED) iPADS

I advise against any solution where you email the link to the STUDENTS because I think you lose more time than on a tower/notebook waiting for students to login to email.

1. Create a doc with a link to the live form and put the doc in shared folder on Drive accessible by the default account for your cart.

2. Take the link to the live form and shorten it with a service like bit.ly or tinyurl.com. Put the shortened link on your white/chalk/SMART/Promethean board or projector.

3. Take the link to the live form and post it to your class website

4. Embed the live form on your class website (Process simplified if you use Google Sites)

ON 1:1 iPADS OR BYOD

1. Create a doc with a link to the live form and put the doc in shared folder on Drive accessible by all the students in your class. You'll need to share the folder with their personal Google accounts.

2. Take the link to the live form and shorten it with a service like bit.ly or tinyurl.com. Put the shortened link on your white/chalk/SMART/Promethean board or projector.

3. Take the link to the live form and post it to your class website

4. Embed the live form on your class website (Process simplified if you use Google Sites)

HOW DO I KNOW WHICH OPTION IS BEST FOR ME?

I have an iPad cart in my room from which students access Drive from a shared account, and I will often use several of these options for one Form. Which solution is best for me usually depends on if I want students to have access to the form from home (on their own accounts) or if we'll just be using it in class). My best advice is to not fall in love with any ONE application.

Socrative 2.0 - "Clicker" Platform Gets Better

I've been a huge fan of iOS/Android/web app Socrative to replace the clickers in my classroom since the first week I had iPads in my classroom (January 2011).

I've used it for exit tickets, bell-work, chapter reviews, guided practice during a lecture, reflection on learning, and even a semester final. My students have ALWAYS complained that if they made a mistake or wanted to skip around, there was no "go back" functionality within Socrative. As flashy and fun as the app is, I've always leaned heavier on Google Forms to give my students that flexibility.

I gave a presentation last week on replacing the Scantron with digital tools that give you richer, quicker feedback and allow you to assess more than multiple choice. I love Socrative as a tool to close what I called the "feedback gap," that time between when you give an assessment, grade it, and then pass it back. What I didn't know was that Socrative had a new version in beta that addressed the "go back" functionality that I mentioned above! You can access the beta version of Socrative 2.0 by both you and your students using beta.socrative.com

The U/I is fresh, but there's more here than that!

Rather than write anything more, I decided to run through Socrative 2.0 briefly and share some of the new teacher and student features.

This video screencasts:
Administering a saved quiz - choosing quiz, setting student paced
Student taking quiz, going back through work and editing responses (Socrative 1.0 did not allow editing or skipping around)
Student submitting response
Viewing specific student responses and results (Socrative 1.0 only showed a student's score)
Finishing the saved quiz and getting a report

I last wrote about Socrative soon after the "insert image" into a question function went public, and it was much needed, but I think I even more appreciate the new student pacing options in Socrative 2.0.

Data Doesn't Have to Be Scary - How You Get it Matters

Do you ever feel like you're left with a pile like this after you've collected data for a survey or given a common assessment that needs to be graded and entered into a spreadsheet?

Yeah, I Know Someone Like That...
Gathering data to use for your building goals, data teams, or class statistics projects doesn't have to end with you and/or your colleagues spending hours in front of a spreadsheet entering values (and inevitably making errors). This TED Talk from global health consultant and pediatrician Joel Selanikio (@jselanikio) chronicles his experience with paper surveys in the developing world. What Dr. Selanikio realized from his field observations was that no matter how many nurses tramped through jungles door-to-door surveying families on child births, immunizations, deaths, and the like, dealing with the data was a cumbersome, daunting task that usually was abandoned. The result was "data-driven" decision making on vaccine supply that was formed from very small, very incomplete datasets.




What's This Mean for Me as a Teacher?
Dr. Selanikio's story is about the success of cloud-based, user-friendly, digital data collection methods, and I think we can experience the same in our schools. Beyond the results your state sends weeks (months?) after your spring standardized testing, how much of the data you gather about the student learning at your school is ever compiled electronically?

I think a lot of the one-more-thing mentally that many teachers associate with data teams in their schools is the result of their experiences grading everything by hand, tallying the scores on paper or in their grading software, and THEN taking the scores and (hopefully) copying and pasting them into some common spreadsheet. So how can you experience a similar explosion of efficiency like observed in the TED Talk?

If it cannot be gathered electronically, don't collect the data.

The Shift

Only collecting data electronically MAY mean that you and your team have to rewrite some assessments, but that might be for the best, anyway. Which is more valuable, asking a student to graph the equation of a line in slope-intercept form, (which would be hard to enter on a spreadsheet) or having the student graph the equation of a line and then tell something about its slope, intercept, or coordinates? Once students are taking what they do graphically and making textual conclusions or inferences, those responses can easily be matched and manipulated in Excel.

What Ways Can I Gather Data Electronically in My Classroom?

The secret is in taking advantage of mobile devices that you and your students already have.

Try an of these on for size:

• Google Forms (Here's how I did it)
• Socrative (Here's how I did it)
• MagPi

Fewer Than 1/4 of Americans Use "Advanced" Math At Work...

But how many use “advanced” writing?? No one ever poses this question – is it because a larger portion of Americans think they are “good” writers? (As opposed to anyone who has ever said, “I was never good at math.”)

This post from the Atlantic takes research from Northeastern University professor, Michael Handel, and puts together his charts into graphs. (Here’s How Little Math Americans Actually Use at Work – Jordan Weissmann – The Atlantic.)

This is my favorite-

Does it surprise you that SKILL and LABOR jobs use the highest percentage of “advanced” math? These careers like machinists, electricians, and others that require extensive trade school training are rising in demand as baby boomers retire. (I wrote more about the new role of tech school here – vocational training is coming back and we need to be steering some traditional “college” students in that direction)

Once I went to Mr. Handel’s Northeastern page and downloaded the research Atlantic used for their graphs, I uncovered another layer of the picture that may (or may not) surprise you.

The drop-off from basic to advanced writing between skilled white-collar and blue-collar to unskilled is even more pronounced than with math.

Here are the numbers together.

It’s probably not fair to make a direct comparison between the yellow and blue bands in each section of the table, but even in the “more advanced” red band on the math section, those percentages aren’t drastically lower than those of the “five pages” yellow band in writing, and for blue collar workers, the percentage of math users is HIGHER.

---

So, tell me, why is our culture not in an uproar over writing formally as they are over “real,” relevant uses of Algebra? Where are all the programs to get kids using math in their liberal arts courses like we have to get kids writing in math and science?

Co-Teaching for Relevance with WordSift.com and Data

Relevance seems to be a theme this week. Touche', Dr. Hopper.

Yesterday I wrote about my frustration with what I thought I was highly relevant lesson and the varying degrees that my students bought into the premise and were engaged in our graph/function activities. Since relevance is an area of focus our building principal is leading, I shared the post with him to get some feedback.

He made a great point that while I had, indeed made a great attempt at relevance, relevant to me doesn't always translate to relevance to my students. Something I'd kind of observed but had not solidified - kids don't really buy picture packages anymore, they just opt for the CD files. Truthfully, I should have been alerted to problems when I had to explain how buying photos works... LOL.

Today in my Algebra II class, I revisited a tool that I piloted first last Thursday to try and steer my Applied class's inevitable preoccupation with Valentine's Day into math activites.

The Tool

Wordsift.com from Stanford University is no ordinary word cloud generator. Beyond the basics, WordSift allows you to highlight tags by subject relevance, and creates a concept map of related topics to generate ideas for further research. Here's a video demo from a science class for more in-depth info.

Obviously, my Applied class loves math!	A concept map about sleeping
This was right after lunch. :)

The Catch

If this were, say, a creative writing class, we could have then found interesting ways to express our feelings about love or food, or had it been history we may have looked at food in a given period or place. But this is MATH CLASS, where cool ideas and easy ideas rarely intersect. :) How do I incorporate co-teaching and relevance into analyzing polynomial functions?! My book has several problems like this:

Sure, they're "real-world," but you're not getting any extra points with your students for engaging them with topics they're waiting to sink their teeth into.

Using Data

 My go-to relevance kicker in math class is to go to the data, so I sent my little darlings on a data hunt to make line graphs on a topic of their choosing.  Here's where things are going to get "ugly:" even after your students get to make a choice about their topic, they're going to have to evaluate that choice for usefulness. Whenever they asked me if the set they'd found would work, most of the time all I had to ask was, "If that's your set, what are the IV and DV?" When they realized they couldn't (usually because they were dealing with a qualitative variable), they knew to move on. Here are the rest of my instructions for the assignment.

The Key

It came as no surprise, but when I tried this the first time with Applied and "love," even after we were a little more specific and looked for things like marriage, divorce, or # of teddy bears sold over a period of years, without prior planning, the kids were kind of sinking in the entirety of the internet. The fixated on answers from Answers.com that were less than reliable. To find more success and ensure more viability of datasets, here are some good places to get started:

Data Sources

• Misc., random topics (but a GOOD variety)
• Carnegie Mellon Data and Story Library
• People in different countries over time
• Gapminder.org
• People, Weather, Defense, Business in the US
• Business and Finance in the US
• Sports records over time
• TI Data Sets for uploading with TI Connect 
• (Most Statistics textbook websites will have accompanying dataset files. These happen to come from WH Freeman, The Practice of Statistics, 4e)
• Generate your own with the TI CBL or CBR
• How-to's here and here

Extra guidance: Gapminder is most extensive (and has some amazing visualizations. Bonus video showcasing those here). The Census Bureau has an amazingly sortable index on business and industry time series and trend charts. I'd lean toward going here for the most user-friendly (although perhaps less customized to student interest) experience.

Census Bureau's Index

Adaptations for YOUR class:

Using data sets to enhance the relevance of your students' problem sets and studies is not something I think you're going to be able to do every day. Some days, you're going to have to provide direct instruction building up to your relevance piece, or more focus practice building on their work from a previous project or activity. What's important to remember is that the extra choices, evaluations, and connections that your students have to make when it does come time to incorporate datasets is going to pay off in the end as you build your automatrons into independent learners and thinkers.

FacebookStories.com - Infographics Your Students Will Care About

Have you checked out your Facebook "Year in Review 2012" yet? If you're a blogger, you're probably  a pro at reflection, so maybe you did. What you may have skipped (because I very nearly did) were the "Facebook Trends."

What delightfully surprised me about the 2012 Trends was that it was a collection of culturally relevant infographics. (and even broken down by country. and analyzed.)

Background

I LOVE infographics. They're really just a 21st century repackaging of pie charts, line graphs, or histograms with words and associated images, but I love them because (good) ones are designed (instead of produced) and they're relevant. Pie charts live in boring budget proposals; line graphs on the ticker of Bloomberg TV or the Wall Street Journal. But infographics get shared on your Facebook timeline. Their pinned to your "Isn't That Clever" Pinterest board. They're so integral to the layout of USA Today, you probably didn't even notice.

To start off the year in AP Stats (and to ensure my students had appropriate degrees of tech proficiency before I unleashed wicked expectations upon them), I had everyone bring in infographics to share and then we discussed the ways graphs were represented and repackaged on them.

I think most of them just ended up doing a Google image search for "infographics," but here were the sites I suggested they try:

nerdgraphs.com
visual.ly
coolinfographics.com
Infographics - GOOD
flowingdata.com

The unintentional consequence of this assignment was that I also got to know my students' interest a little better through their infographic choices.

Here was my favorite; the controller pie charts opened up a discussion for me. Lost scaling opportunity in the bottom left corner about best-selling genres.

So What?

My Stats students did a good job grabbing infographics, and most of them took a clear interest to the assignment and made it meaningful, but what I like about Facebook Stories' Trends is that they're simply produced, yet relevant to their audience, and in an marketplace your students are frequenting.  Better than that, in the endless battle between what I want and what I can accomplish, these graphs represent to me an even more approachable example to have my students creating their own infographs. (When that finally happens.)

The one at right features songs that came up most in status updates. It's a pie chart.... but not really. Way to psych me out. I like these the slices were scaled by radial length rather than degrees because my eye tends to ignore tiny slices that have arrows pointed to them. (No offense, east coast, but this is kind of what I do when I look at maps of the US, too)

I mean, seriously. Can't you imagine this on a .PPT slide with the speaker saying, "As you can clearly see..."

There were a few that were slightly confusing, however, and strangely enough, looked very much like something I'd expect to see from a student who lazily wanted a easily scaled shape.

Bottom Line:

In my opinion, infographics are one of the least intimidating ways for students to begin publishing for the web and sharing on social media. Kids love poster projects - infographics are a digital extension of that (but they don't even HAVE to be digital). 

Infographics can introduce percentage problems, experimental design, discussions on statistical bias, geometric similarity, and even log scales in upper-level courses. Because they're all over the web and literally relevant to any interest, they're also convenient for enhancing engagement through choice and personalization.

Resources:

I went to a great infographic breakout session with +Kathy Schrock (@kathyschrock on twitter) at METC 2012. She's said it better than I can; here's her infographics page. If you're going to METC 2013 (after you see me) make sure you check out at least one of her sessions. 

Is Learning Invisible in My Classroom or Does It Just Not Exist? A Rationale for Data Team Analysis

"We don't know one percent of one millionth about anything" - Thomas Edison

Teachers are paid to see what no one else can, you know? All of the learning and growth our students (hopefully) gain for the time they're in our classrooms - you can't SEE it. Not even on tests or projects. Like many of the forces and ideas John Lloyd mentions in this TED_Ed animation, learning and knowledge are also invisible. We only see the effects of the two.

Painting an image around the data you garner in your classroom is can help you see those effects. In the same way you feel a gust more than a breeze, more assessments give you more data (and more effect to see).  Sitting down with student examples in your PLC or data teams and making inferences about learning, mistakes, and building blocks and then making hypotheses are the educational equivalent of laboratory trials.

I don't intend to be hyperbolic, but when we make purely inferential decisions based on the population of students in our own classes for our instructional design, we place ourselves somewhere on the scientific spectrum usually reserved for bloodletting or other medieval medicines - you're doing things because they seem to make sense. Yes, a veteran teachers can draw upon their years of experience to increase sample size to an extent, but they aren't doing their colleagues any favors, and there are two possible final outcomes: (1) they retire and no one around and most of their knowledge and expertise leaves with them, (2) they burn out and cannot change when they day (inevitably) comes.

My encouragement to anyone who feels like their team or department doesn't willingly want to engage in common assessments, data analysis, or other research/scientific methods is to start with something simple. We have a data team meeting template from Lead and Learn in our district that is OVERWHELMING if you've not scaffolded your team with supports and celebrations up to it.

Here are some of the ideas and principles that have worked on our team.

If I were having this conversation with people in my building right now, some one would be thinking (or saying) right about now,

"I don't need a data team or a PLC to know what my kids know and don't know."

Perhaps that's true.  My carrot for that teacher (since we all ultimately want to know what's in it for us) is to suggest that even if your class is learning at or above grade level and you have all of the tools and techniques, when you share that expertise with others, you'll end up improving the quality of the students who come to you. Who doesn't want a leg up?

My summary question:
When you look deeper into your students, do you see more or nothing?