Wow! I have been away for a few days, and there are follow-on comments I haven't read yet as I clean up a 1000-posting Python backlog, winnowed to the 100 that I intend to read. This is awesome. First, I learned statistics in college, and yet it wasn't until, many years later where I took on being a statistician for a 29-week training project in which people managed their progress and achievement of their results through statistics that my relationship changed from a fun game with mathematics and numbers to an experienced measure of something that was happening in the world. I affirm that the *mechanical* use of computers is not appropriate in education or *anywhere* *else*. I tutored high-school algebra last summer, and I am putting together a team of 10 to provide more for the same school (the one my entire family attended) using fellow alumni from the class of '57. One of the things that I noticed is that the use of calculators and decimal notation leaves kids completely at sea when we get to rationals again as part of algebra (where decimal simplifications are unavailable). I don't mean to disparage the use of calculators. What I see is missing is that intimate relationship with numbers and arithmetic in which we begin to develop a sense of how these things work and can be confident in the manipulations and relationships that the algebra over standard arithmetic then abstracts and makes systematic. I tutored my 11-year-old grandnephew, a new 6th grader earlier this school year, and I saw how all he wanted to do was get an answer the teacher would accept. There was nothing about how we learned to deal with our fallibility as arithmeticians, being able to demonstrate our results to others and, indeed, being able to coach a fellow student. (I recently noticed that this is all in Polya's "How to Solve It", but when I examined it as a college freshman I didn't get it.) Getting back to the key point. Having an intimate relationship with the data and having a way to visualize the data's story born from that familiarity is crucial. When I worked for engineers at Boeing as a 19-year-old engineering aide, it was amazing to see their sense of the data and the automatic way their attention was drawn to things that looked off and needed to be explored more deeply. There was usually an error in the calculations, in some input data, or the rough model we were perfecting. I had the same experience working with Paul Horst, a serious statistician at the University of Washington at that time. Don't let go on what you observed. It is critical and much to be cultivated if we are to encourage the future engineers, managers, and leaders who we are going to entrust with shepherding the technologies of the future. The biggest concern I have is the lack of experience teachers may have with this themselves and how they are being thrown into a world of computer use without any way to get grounded in where the power really is. It does not empower them to teach and it does not give them a sense of the wonder and power of scientific approaches. More than anything, there is a missing compassion for human fallibility and the use of tools that mask that rather than give us mastery of it. Thank you for your thoughtfulness and careful observation. -- Dennis -----Original Message----- From: edu-sig-admin@python.org [mailto:edu-sig-admin@python.org]On Behalf Of Thomas O'Connor Sent: Thursday, April 19, 2001 15:39 To: edu-sig@python.org Cc: toconnor@hpvcpto.vcd.hp.com Subject: [Edu-sig] Observations from the Northwest Science Expo On March 12 of this year, I participate as a middle school judge for the Northwest Science Expo held on the campus of Portland State University, in Portland Oregon. I was assigned to the team evaluating middle school behavioral science projects along with 8 other scientists and engineers. We evaluated 21 student projects. This was a great group of kids and I want to be clear that this is in no way a criticism of any of their work. I believe that the judges took much effort to value and encourage the students. But as is often the case, a world view can be shattered by an example of something outstanding, which then shows all else to be mediocre. I had one of those experiences at NWSE, and it relates to the use of computers in education. I'd be interested in any comments anyone in this group has to offer. The outstanding example in this case was a project put together by young lady in the fourth grade (who was, by the way competing against 6-8th graders). Her project investigated the effects of varying light/dark cycle periods on bean plant growth. Her experimental design and investigation was reasonably thorough, particularly for someone her age, but not outstanding by comparison to those she was competing with. What struck me as outstanding however, was how she related to her data. When I asked what conclusions she drew from her experiment, she made an expansive hand motion, one of those "it should be clearly obvious to the most casual observer," gestures towards her hand drawn data plots. With wide eyed excitement, she explained how her data clearly proved her original thesis incorrect. It was clear that she had fully internalized her data. In this, she stood apart from here peers. By contrast, most other student I spoke with related to their graphs and charts as fuzzy abstract representations of their data. Some examples: * More than half of the students produced three-dimensional bar charts to display data. Unfortunately, only one student was able to accurately read their bar charts. The others failed to account for the parallax between the bar and the back of the graph which represented the X scale. * One young man was analyzing the effect of color on mood. But when he reported his results, his graph was color coded for color. In other words, his red bar represented the color black, the pink bar represented yellow, the yellow bar represented green. When asked about this, he said his software wouldn't let him pick the colors of the bars in his bar-chart. * An 8th grader noted that her results did not vary significantly from what would have been predicted from a purely random sampling. This was a very enlightened analysis, and the judges all gave her credit for attempting to utilize good statistical analysis. But the statistical theory she was attempting to utilize was clearly well beyond her knowledge and skill level. When asked why so much of her her project display was focused on the statistical analysis of her data when she admitted that she didn't really understand it, she stated, "well, Excel did all the math for me." * A sixth grader did a project to determine which parent the gene for red hair was inherited from. Her knowledge of genetics was impressive, particularly for her age. But the computer generated graphs she displayed conveyed no meaning to any of the judges. Had she displayed and focused on the genealogy charts she had stashed in the back of her project notebook, she probably would have won an award. * There were two students who had a very good project on luminescent solutions and the effects of solution temperature on luminescence. While their presentation was very good, what I found most notable in speaking with them was the rate of change graph they had scribbled on the back of a piece of yellow legal pad to explain the cascade effect they had observed. Their scribbled graph conveyed more meaning than all their beautiful computer generated charts. Questions to ponder: -------------------- * Does the use of the computer to generate charts enhance the synthesis of data, or might it actually hinder it? In this case, the fourth grader who was determining environmental effects on plant growth collected her data by drawing points on her graph each day during the experiment. At the science fair, she was able to articulate the meaning of that data better than other middle school students I spoke with. The only other students who showed equivalent understanding did so by utilizing a scribbled graph drawn on the back of a legal pad. So is there a correlation between the manual plotting of data and the cognitive interpretation of that data? * Gerald E. Jones in "How to LIE with CHARTS," on the "old fassion" approach to charting mused: Having such crude tools might have forced those early chart-makers into slower thought processes. It is conceivable that they actually pondered carefully composition--maybe even the content!--of those pathetically simple charts and graphs. Can it be that in their technological poverty they achieved a higher level of consciousness? Did they actually come to grasp the meaning of their graphic creations? [1] With the proliferation of three-dimensional bar that even the creators can not accurately read, is the real meaning of the data being masked by the visual presentation? * I know from experience that I can take someone who is generally computer phobic but who has a good understanding of statistics, sit them down in front of Excel, and within a few hours they can be using it productively. On the other hand, as I observed, an 8th grader who knows Excel inside and out, cannot do meaningful statistics. So why do so many people insist that schools teach Excel, or Word, or Powerpoint for example? Shouldn't the real focus be on teaching number theory, problem solving, language composition and cognitive perception? I'm beginning to wonder how much benefit computers actually add to the learning process? I'd welcome a discussion on the topic by those who are effectively utilizing computers in their curriculum today. Thanks for the bandwidth. Tom O. ----- Thomas O'Connor toconnor@vcd.hp.com Hewlett Packard, Vancouver Washington Phone: (360) 212-5031 Telnet: 212-5031 [1] "How to LIE with CHARTS," Gerald E. Jones, Sybex, 1995, p. XVII. See also: "The Visual Display of Quantative Information," Edward Tufte, Graphics Press, 1983 ----- Thomas O'Connor toconnor@vcd.hp.com Hewlett Packard, Vancouver Washington Phone: (360) 212-5031 Telnet: 212-5031 _______________________________________________ Edu-sig mailing list Edu-sig@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/edu-sig