Sharing Good Practice
Make learning statistics fun
for students
By Maarit Rossi
Photo provided by Maarit Rossi.
I
had a great opportunity to teach
statistics to 5th grade German and
Scottish students together with
my own students. Statistics was a
new area of Maths to my students, and
I did not know how familiar it would be
to the other students either. Students
did not know each other because they
had just arrived in Finland. It was also a
new situation for my students and me
because we would speak in English. All
three countries started a three years
Erasmus project “Entrepreneurial
and Innovative Solutions to Climate
Change” where they want to compare
the effects of climate change in
different countries. The theme of
the project is very similar to our new
Finnish curriculum – phenomenon
based learning. In this learning
method, it is important to study the
theme from many different viewpoints,
an interdisciplinary combination of
many subjects. The subjects could be:
Maths, language and social studies.
How do some textbooks start
teaching statistics?
The start of our book has a lot of data
for students to classify. However, the
data is about an imaginary scenario!
The next chapter trains students
to read line graphs and bar charts.
Then there are calculations of mean,
median, mode and range. The only
problem is that all has to be calculated
individually. The content is little too
pretentious, far from students’ life.
If you want to make learning interesting
and fun for students, they have to
take part in their own learning. As
teachers, we value the same things
in our professional development
as students. Learning by doing is
suitable for all ages. It c