Std Deviation

[schanzer]

• [x] Integrate Data Cycle
• [x] Cat-Age worksheet
• [x] Cat-Age-Outlier worksheet

[schanzer]

@flannery-denny this lesson is ready for review!

[flannery-denny]

@schanzer which branch is this on?

[schanzer]

Anything starting with fall2022 (I'm keeping both in sync)

[flannery-denny]

@schanzer - I'm excited to see you working on this lesson! It feels even more important now that I see your draft... and I think it has a way to go.

I'm making a list of ideas / questions. If you'd like me to push a commit with significant reformatting proposals, lmk and I can create a visual of much of what's listed below for you to consider and edit, but I'm hopeful my words are clear and think the changes are significant enough you'd probably rather read and think about them.

• [x] Before I dig into the lesson itself, this is the first that I'm seeing

• Classroom Visual: Language Table

in the Materials section. I don't love it. If it's going to be there Classroom Visual: should be opaque and italicized like the word optional rather than bolded... and it obviously shouldn't be in both preparation and materials.

• [x] The opening launch feels lecture heavy, which makes me think there's a missing workbook page.
• [x] Instead of telling them that the mean age is 3, could we ask them to find the mean from a list? And then come up with another list with the same mean to jog their memory about how to find mean before asking them to make a list?

Computing Standard DeviationI

• [x] I suggest making a table for them to complete for number 2-3
• [x] I would be uncertain as to how many cats are any given age from this histogram... For example, how many are 7? 2? 0? 1 would round to 7 and 1 would round to 8? What are you expecting? I would suggest showing an example filled in on the table for over thinkers like me or being more explicit with how you want them to decide.
• [x] I'm not sure about the arrow drawing directions (thinking on it)
• [x] recommend making a table for listing distances and squaring those same distances to help keep students organized.

Matching Mean and Standard DeviationI

• [x] Possible to teach them how to calculate std deviation in pyret from a list?
• [x] I would pick just one place to list this in the lesson plan.

I'll have another round of feedback, but hope this is enough to get things moving.

The Spread of My Dataset

• [x] Noticing that What type of question is this? (circle one) is much larger font than the others.
• [x] I suggest having them do a second version of this page for the Animals Dataset first so that we can give them an example on the top and they can discuss as a class.

[schanzer]

@flannery-denny thanks for this! I totally agree that the Launch is too long. It also goes down into some subtle discussion, which is inappropriate for an introductory lesson. I've pushed a change that cuts out some of this text, and also starts the cat-age worksheet during the launch section to give students some grounding.

Unfortunately we can't use lists in Pyret. We could ask them to compute the mean from a list on paper, but (a) they'll have already done this in measures of center, (b) of all the measures of center, mean is the one students generally know best already and (c) they still have to compute the mean in the workbook page - just not from a list.

Making question 2 on the worksheet into a table is a great idea, but I think changing question 6 to a table will make life harder. We want students to list all the numbers, not group them.

I like the idea of using the Data Cycle with the animals dataset first as well! (Done)

I'll fix the data-cycle font-size in a separate commit, tagging the relevant git issue. (Done)

[flannery-denny]

@schanzer The lesson looks much better!

• [x] Noting that the image used on the computing standard deviation workbook page has a huge amount of white space at the bottom. Haven't printed to pdf to see how close you are to the bottom of the page, but on the web version the space at the top stands out to me.

• [x] The effect of an outlier page could use the same reformatting that computing standard deviation got. Table for count. Star instead of arrow to be consistent.

• [x] I suggest having the datacycle page for the animals dataset have 2 data cycles. With the first having a question that you want the whole class to discuss and the second being for students to generate their own question. Was going to check that there is enough data in the dataset for this, but...

• [x] There is no link to the animals dataset in the lesson plan.

[schanzer]

@flannery-denny great notes. Thanks!

I've implemented all of your changes, save for your recommendation to remove the writing portion of the data cycle and add a second one. Instead, I've given students a very concrete question to investigate, with instructions to write their findings as a response to the question.

I think we're going to be doing this with a lot of data cycles throughout the pathway, giving students lots of practice answering a single question and writing about it -- I believe this provides the support that the research paper demands.

[flannery-denny]

@schanzer When I added that last table to Computing Standard Deviation, I had the first four ones filled in. You seem to have hidden them all. If you feel strongly about that, please modify the directions above the table so that they make sense with your vision of the workbook page. Once you've resolved that, I think this issue can be closed.

[schanzer]

@flannery-denny resol