Include ‘statistics’ in a math course? Maybe not :(

The new prep curriculum in mathematics uses a course like Mathematical Literacy as the starting point, where the course is not just about algebra.  The ‘average’ math lit course includes a little bit of statistics, though it’s not clear that this is helping students.

A recent test in my Math Lit course included this question:

According to a study of player salaries back in 1998, here are three bits of information:

Mean Salary: $2.2 million       Median: $1.3 million              Mode: $272,000

One source made a claim that “most NBA players made more than $2 million” that year.
This claim is false.  Explain why; use a complete sentence.

This was question #2; question #1 was to find the 3 ‘averages’ for a given set of values.  As usual, the class did very well on those computational questions.  If somebody asks them for a median, there is a pretty good chance that the students will do fine.

However, when asked to use that same information to support an argument … well, let’s just say that my students did pretty lousy.  One student out of 2 classes (47 students) did a decent job — and all students would have encountered this type of question in their ‘homework’.

The word “most” was the key challenge, because students automatically connected that word with the mode — which is not an answer for this question at all. A good portion of the students actually presented an argument that the claim was true — based on the mean.

We are teaching more statistics (integrated in other courses, specifically) because we are led to believe that everybody will be ‘using’ statistics.  I certainly agree that we are all subjected to good and bad uses of statistics in the everyday navigation of western society.  Does having computational fluency with ‘averages’ contribute to statistical education?  No, not for the majority of our students.

I think we add statistics (and/or probability) to our classes because doing so allows us to believe that we are providing something of value to our students.  A little bit of statistics might very well be worse than no statistics at all.

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