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Thinking
What this looks like in mathematics and statistics
Mathematics and statistics provides students with opportunities to think flexibly, creatively, critically, effectively, strategically, and logically.
Examples of ways students think in mathematics and statistics:
- Students select appropriate methods and strategies when solving problems.
- Students make deductions, they justify and verify, interpret and synthesis and they create models.
- Students hypothesise, investigate, analyse and evaluate.
- Students use mathematics to model real life and hypothetical situations; they make conjectures, challenge assumptions and thinking, and they engage in sense making.
- Students design investigations, explore and use patterns and relationships in data and they predict and envision outcomes.
- Students ask questions, want to know ‘why’, make connections and discern if answers are reasonable.
- Students co-construct knowledge, think about thinking (metacognition) and reflect on their learning.
- Students deal with uncertainty and variation, they seek patterns and generalisations.
Students apply the above to solve problems and model situations in real, mathematical and statistical contexts.
Specific activities
- Exploring quadratic patterns and finding rules.
- Deduce the angle properties of circles.
- Use the statistical investigation cycle (PPDAC) to answer a question.
- Activity: Cell phone pricing plan
- Activity: Forensic formulas
- Activity: How does your cell phone measure up?
- Activity: Measuring with digital pictures
- Activity: 100m sprint times
- Activity: Straight line pictures
- Activity: Water woes
- Activity: Chocolate tasting - simulations and experiments
- Activity: Memory experiment
- Activity: Cool coffee
- Activity: Skid marks
- Activity: Big Bang Theory – Exact values
- Activity: Big Bang Theory – Fractals and complex numbers
- Activity: Big Bang Theory – The sweet spot and conics
- Activity: Linking integration and differentiation
- Activity: 28 Days Later – Zombies
- Activity: Greenpeace
- Activity: I am just not fast enough
- Activity: Legal driving age
- Activity: Fooling the teacher
- Activity: How many babies
- Activity: Lego exercise
Further information
- YouTube – Dan Meyer teaches high school math outside of Santa Cruz, CA, and explores the intersection of math instruction, multimedia, and inquiry-based learning.
- Metacognition – ESOL Online
Last updated June 8, 2018