overview
Turning Data Into Information
John Snodgrass
Course Description:
Educators work with sets of data every day. Teachers look at daily classroom assessment scores to determine whether the class moves on to the next objective or not. Counselors compare local student scores on standardized tests with other districts and with national results. Administrators examine the number of daily absences for students and staff. More informed decisions result from organizing, summarizing, and interpreting the numerical data that confront the people who provide all the services a school district provides. This enterprise - organizing, summarizing, and interpreting numerical data - is an exercise in descriptive statistics. Graphs aid understanding by presenting an overall pattern that one can visually assess. In this course, participants look at a handful of data distributions, focusing on stem-and-leaf plots and dot plots to display and interpret data. The presenter demonstrates how a classroom teacher can quickly examine daily classroom assessment scores to determine whether "any child is being left behind." The strategies are so user-friendly that teachers will learn how to prepare students to examine their own grades.
John Snodgrass
John Snodgrass has spent more than 30 years in the classroom as a full-time teacher with certifications in Mathematics, Data Processing, Computer Science, and Political Science. He combined his classroom experience and other governmental service to teach mathematics, statistics, and computer programming at a Blue Ribbon School of Excellence High School. Mr. Snodgrass retired, only to return to part-time work with middle and high school students at another Blue Ribbon School of Excellence. He taught a math methods course at the university level and inferential statistics at a community college. When the College Board's Advanced Placement Program announced its new AP Statistics course in the mid-1990s, Mr. Snodgrass was asked to teach the course. His excitement over the material in that course motivates him to assist other professionals in developing materials for training teachers. Mr. Snodgrass is eager to share with his colleagues the technology skills that the AP Statistics course required, specifically MINITAB and graphing calculator statistical applications.
