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Chris Papalia

Teaching High School Statistics

@PappyPapalia

Personal Website

chris.papalia@sac.on.ca

https://highschoolteach-r-tdw.netlify.com/

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Chris Papalia

Education Background

Professional Background

Professional Interests

  • Teaching Statistics
  • Data Science and Analytics in R
  • Tech Integration into Teaching & Learning
  • Coaching Hockey, Baseball, and Squash
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Focus

This is a "show and tell" to describe what I've done to develop a better stats experience in high school and explore some of the next steps for high school statistics.

I hope something about this talk can resonate with you and puts into perspective what you see from your students

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1. My Context at SAC

2. Sharing what I do

3. The Future of High School Statistics?

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My Context

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Statistics at St. Andrew's College

Grade 12 - MDM4U: Mathematics of Data Management

  • Three sections, n ~ 15

Grade 12 - AP - Statistics

  • Two sections, n ~ 15

~ 60% of senior students

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Since my colleague and I arrived in 2012 the program has grown considerably - picked up an extra section of AP Stats and full sections of MDM

Units of Study: MDM4U

  1. One-Variable Data (categorical/numerical)

  2. Individuals, Z-Scores, Comparing Individuals

  3. Two Variable Data - Stacked/dodged bar plots and scatter plots

  4. Study and Experimental Design Principles

  5. Probability and Counting (Independence, Conditional)

  6. Probability Distributions (binomial, geometric, discrete random variables)

  7. Project/Investigation - Using RStudio (hopefully); Data Visualizations

Big Ideas: See Data. Ask Questions. Try to find answers.

Lots of emphasis on using software like Excel and Fathom to:

  • explore data
  • simulate outcomes
  • visualize data

Most of the data we look at is already in "nice, tidy, rectangles" that I provide to students

There is emphasis on projects that are meaningful to students where student find data they're interested in using.

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This is their opportunity to use the software tools we have access to.. Excel, Fathom, R and finding data in several sources.

An interesting conflict is we really get to see the gap in reproducibility and data cleaning/tidying and the frustrations in using software like excel with dates, times, and then getting the data to a point where it's usable.

Story of spending one hour trying to automate something that would take you 10 minutes... trade-off when student see this as a one-off. Especially with folks who are doing simulations etc.

Units of Study: AP-Stats

  1. Exploring One-Variable Data

  2. Exploring Two-Variable Data

  3. Collecting Data

  4. Probability, Random Variables, and Probability Distributions

  5. Sampling Distributions

  6. Inference for Categorical Data

  7. Inference for Numerical Data

  8. Inference with Chi-Squares

  9. Inference with Linear Regression

Big Ideas: See Data. Ask Questions. Try to find answers. Prepare for Exam

The bulk of the year is spent working towards AP Exam preparation -> fewer projects

The end of the year project conflicts with their other AP - Exams -> optional investigation

For those who are in the AP - Capstone, I am their "capstone advisor" and encourage them to use RStudio for their analysis.

  • {patentr} for analysis on video game patents
  • {tidytext} for analysis on Drake's lyrics
  • Excel for others... pivot tables; grouping; reproducibility is really a problem I've discovered.
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Caden - manually entering pdf data with characters when he has access to the csv.

Ben and Marshall vs Caden and Paul... Sample code and comments on a test file vs videos and screen clips and file structure changes. It's old-hat for you folks, but it was a huge moment for me to truly understand the value of reproducibility. Similarly, the students really "got it" when I suggested doing it on a small file and then apply the code to other features.

In both classes I try to use R coding to explore data before I give it to them to look at and ask questions about... This is particularly useful in the one and two-variable

Day-to-day...

75-minute periods (every other day - full year)

Textbook: OpenIntro Stats Reading and Example Problems

AP Free-Response Problems and OpenIntro Problems during class and homework

Data analysis projects to apply their learning to data of their choice

Data, Simulations, Spreadsheets as often as possible

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Themes: sports, nhl-reference, mlbstatcast, kaggle imdb, tidytuesday, statcan Videos of me entering data into excel and then filtering it into other sheets and looking using pivot tables.

Sharing what I do

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Me teaching stats 12 years ago

Calculations by hand

TI 84 was a luxury

Reserve a computer lab once/month

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Journey...2009 - 2019

Part I - Unit Restructure

Part II - Software

Part III - Confidence

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#Rstats

R for Data Science

Dr. Mine Çetinkaya-Rundel (DS in a Box)

RStudio Community (Webinars and more)

Tidy Tuesday

Arts + Program at SAC

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Learning Activities

1. Everything is framed in describing one-variable statistics shape, centre, spread (foundation of the course)

2. Emphasis on working with data to illustrate concepts

3. Refer to AP Exam questions and scoring guidlines

4. Project Prep - Interpret (don't report) the statistics and visualizations

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Everything is framed by describing one-variable statistics

We try to use simulations and visualizations with every topic

This is the software called Fathom

This is the software called Fathom

This is a beginning to simulation-based inference in the experimental design unit

This is a beginning to simulation-based inference in the experimental design unit

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Emphasis on data and applets to illustrate concepts

Art of Stat - Web Apps

Art of Stat - Web Apps

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Refer to AP Exam questions and scoring guidlines

MS Teams Collaboration Space/Shared Space/Board

Group work, presentations, and grading rubrics

Pass the problem, create the statistics/data

The AP Statistics Exam Page

  • This page offers all of the previous AP Free-Response Questions and Solution Rubrics
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Projects and Readings

hockey-reference

gapminder

fivethirtyeight data

Freakonomics Podcasts

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More Information - My talk from OAME May 2017/May 2019

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The Future?

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Gaps

1. Ontario's curricular focus/elective course

2. Calculus remains the "Crystal Palace" in math

3. No coherent computing background

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MDM4U lives in the intersection of folks who dislike math, and folks who are interested for a "good grade"

Admissions officers differentiate based on calculus

Teachers lack the knowledge-base to support a scaled statistics course

  • Software remains limited for teachers/students/AP programs and so there is very limited ability for students to look at an examine models, regression, and prediction.

On-boarding with the RStudio Cloud program was great but then it's been monetized Teaching teachers to trouble-shoot basic problems is a mess...

The Future - Data Science in High School?

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Some Social Justice Data - skew the script Some sports data - Michael Lopez Five Thirty Eight Tidy Tuesday

More coding...? Kareem Carr

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Data Science/Statistics in High School looks like this...

Tidy, Transform, and Model require technical skills that most students don't have...

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Strategies

(Good and Bad)

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Live Coding EDA

I explore the data and discuss questions and answers with the class

David Robinson Screencasts

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Students and I try to ask questions and find answers within the data

I include this process on a test and have them "explore" it

Jumping Into OpenIntro Labs

Last year I used RStudio Cloud to have students work through the labs associated with the tidyverse versions of the OpenIntro labs in November/December.

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Co-Curricular Programming - R4DV Club

Fall 2018 - Core group of 6

  • Tidy Tuesday and Shoeless Joe's

Spring 2020 - Core Group of 6

  • Launch website using {distill} and use RStudio.Cloud for the activities

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My Experiment This Year...

Rstudio Primers

DoSS Toolkit

Allow Excel as another option

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The Future - Projects and Partnerships

Great relationship with our CS department

  • We want to collaborate with CS and eventually work towards creating a cohort of students who are using computing (and version control?) to solve problems in several fields.

Finding ways for students to apply statistical analysis and computing through the AP Capstone Program and the R for Data Visualization Club

  • Marshall used {patentsview} to extract patents and use tidyverse to model patents over time
  • Ben used {tidytext} and references to do sentiment analysis with Drake lyrics
  • Select group of student sign-up for the club (See the R Club website from last year)
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Thank You!

Thank You!

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Chris Papalia

Education Background

Professional Background

Professional Interests

  • Teaching Statistics
  • Data Science and Analytics in R
  • Tech Integration into Teaching & Learning
  • Coaching Hockey, Baseball, and Squash
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