A K-12 Quantitative Literacy Program for Pennsylvania

To help both elementary and secondary teachers in Pennsylvania implement the probability and statistics goals of the K-12 NCTM Standards into their classrooms, Project SEQuaL (Statistics Education through Quantitative Literacy) has been established at Indiana University of Pennsylvania (IUP). Funding was obtained through an Eisenhower grant. To date, workshops using the Quantitative Literacy (QL) Series as the primary materials have been given during the summers of 1992 and 1993, to serve a total of 40 elementary and 42 secondary teachers.

SEQuaL is a QL training program for K-12 teachers that consists of a pre- workshop orientation, an intensive one-week training workshop and two follow- up sessions. The follow-ups are used for teachers to describe how they planned, taught and assessed their own QL class units and to present examples of their students' QL projects. The workshop included five daily sessions for the participants, including a "Statistician's Day" and a "School Administrator's Day." During the Statistician's Day, ASA chapter statisticians from government, academia and industry were present to participate in the workshop. Administrators from the school districts represented were invited to attend the School Administrator's Day to give the administrator a comprehensive overview of the workshop, its statistical content, the teaching techniques employed and suggested materials needed for implementation of quantitative literacy into their curriculum. It is very important that administrators appreciate the content of the material and what is required to implement it.

Participants worked in teams to carry out a project involving a statistical investigation. The projects began with the formation of a question, moved to collecting data and analyzing the data and ended with conclusions related to the original question. Teams presented their findings to the entire group as a concluding activity.

The unique aspect of the SEQuaL workshop is the comprehensive training provided for elementary school teachers. This workshop used the texts of the QL series, the Used Numbers Series, the NCTM Addendum Series plus other commercial tests, Data Insights software, and original materials that were developed by the workshop leaders.

There are advantages and disadvantages with conducting a comprehensive K-12 workshop. Among the advantages are:

Elementary and secondary teachers interact with teachers within the same district. Ideally a school district team should consist of 4 teachers, one each from grades K-3, 4-6, 7-9 and 10-12. The team can then form a QL committee to train other teachers in their district.
Teachers can see the K-12 curriculum and their part in the overall picture.
Elementary teachers serve as great models for creative activity-based lessons, thus challenging secondary teachers not to rely on the traditional lecture/formula teaching approach. It seems that elementary teachers tend to have more interesting project presentations as they use skits, costumes, props, etc., very naturally.
Secondary teachers provide elementary teachers with an even better understanding of the scope of probability and statistics with projects that typically require more advanced analysis.

Among the disadvantages are:

There is increased complexity with regard to materials coordination and class scheduling.
More facilities are needed to put on the workshops.

To continue the project, IUP has joined with the school districts in the surrounding two county region to form "academic alliances" in a variety of areas such as the arts, library science, social studies and home economics.

The purpose of these alliances is to create and maintain conversation among basic and higher education faculty regarding knowledge development in a discipline. The SEQuaL team is in the process of establishing the Mathematics Academic Alliance for Quantitative Literacy (MAAQL). This alliance will meet regularly (bimonthly or quarterly) for a dinner and presentations on quantitative literacy. Its activities will be open to all teachers in the districts, thus to encourage past workshop participants to keep abreast of QL and to interest other teachers in attending a workshop.

Having created a model workshop and having trained teachers in the IUP area, the SEQuaL team also plans to present workshops at regional sites around the state of Pennsylvania. IUP will serve as a focal point for offering these workshops by establishing the Center for Statistical Education in Pennsylvania (CSEPA). CSEPA will exist at IUP for the purpose of doing research in probability and statistics education, reviewing and gathering related information and instructional material and disseminating information and materials to enhance the instruction of quantitative literacy throughout Pennsylvania. Through the creation of CSEPA, teachers in the state can access a data base of instructional QL materials, QL lessons used by past participant-teachers in their classes and research articles in the area of prbability and statistics education. CSEPA, in conjunction with the MAAQL alliance, is to publish a QL newsletter for distribution to SEQuaL participants, intermediate units and other interested educators in Pennsylvania.

Fred Morgan and Jack Shepler
Indiana University of Pennsylvania
Indiana, Pennsylvania

Editor's Note: The Editor thanks Fred and Jack for allowing him to extract this article from material they presented at the American Statistical Association meeting in San Francisco last August. To be in a position to cover the quantitative literacy needs of a whole state is very exciting.

Article taken from the Winter 1994 issue of The Statistics Teacher Network Published by the ASA/NCTM Joint Committee on the Curriculum in Statistics and Probability.

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jshepler@grove.iup.edu