This project is for any teacher who is interested in their students having an authentic experience in both math and scientific thinking. It was developed by Ramon Garcia who is a math teacher at the Adult Learning Center in the Borough of Manhattan Community College (BMCC). The project engages students in an authentic scientific research project that requires them to use math skills, but also writing skills as they write a standard research report to display their findings.
Ramon had been leading his class through a semester-long study of data and statistics. His students had explored concepts like measures of central tendency (mean, median, mode, range), percentages, reasonableness, numerical appropriateness, quartiles, interquartile range, etc. Ramon designed the project to give students the opportunity to show how well they understood the concepts they had been studying. He also wanted them to experience the difference between knowing enough to answer a statistics-based HSE test question and understanding enough to be able to apply the same statistical concepts to analyze data in the real-world.
Adult education students and teachers all know that science is one of the subjects students must pass on the GED. But many students (and some teachers) are surprised by how much math there is on the GED Science subtest:
“…in the particular case of many statistics-based skills, those skills appear on the current test in the Science and Social Studies tests, as opposed to the Mathematical Reasoning test.”
(from page 40 of the GED Assessment Guide for Educators: Mathematical Reasoning, June 2016)
Here are just a few examples of the types of math that our students may have to do on the Science section of the GED:
- Interpret scientific results and information in graphs, tables and various scientific diagrams
- Express scientific information or findings numerically or symbolically
- Use a sample of data to draw conclusions about a larger set of data
- Calculate the mean, median, and mode of a data set
(from pages 6-8 of the GED Assessment Guide for Educators: Science, October 2020)
Below is a description of how Ramon structured the activity with his students. As you look over his students’ work, consider how many of the skills they are using from the list above.
Remember, this is only one example of what teachers can do with their own students. Please adapt and adjust as makes sense in your particular situation.
Step 1: Choosing a Data Set & Question
Ramon gave his class (13 students) several choices of data sets the class could explore. Some of the topics included blood, books, cereal, marathon runners, stock market, and stress levels. After much deliberation, the class choose to look at data on breakfast cereals.
Here is the data Ramon shared:
Step 2: Guidelines for Writing Data-Based Research Reports
The class read a handout Ramon created called “Guidelines for Writing Data-Based Research Reports.” (pdf linked above). They spent about an hour reading it aloud and discussing it as they went. Then Ramon asked his class to break themselves up into groups and allowed them to decide which section of the report they’d each be responsible for. He made every effort not to intervene in how students organized themselves, other than to answer questions they had regarding what they might need to write. In the end, one group was responsible for the Introduction, another for the Methods section, another for the Results. They wrote simultaneously and then shared drafts, reconciled differences, and wove everything together as a first drafts. Groups were given freedom to decide what to include or not include, what to focus on or not, what to write about or not, etc.
Which is a Healthy Breakfast Cereal for You and Your Family? – FIRST DRAFT
Step 3: Revision
The next important phase of writing a research paper was revision. Return to the first draft in the next class. Have a conversation about revision (Here are some ideas: 17 Approaches for Encouraging Students to Revise Their Writing). Then have students pick the section they want to revise, sort themselves into groups, and start working together on revising their section.
In Ramon’s case, he brought the data and first draft written by his morning class to his evening class and had them make revisions in a computer lab. Teachers can also bring the first draft back to the same students who wrote it and have them work on revising it in their next class.
Is Breakfast Cereal a Healthy Option for You and Your Family? – REVISED DRAFT
Step 4: Additional Reading
Ramon found a reading online that seemed to align with the direction the student report was heading in. Teachers can do the same, and/or bring in a reading that has come to a different conclusion. Here is the reading Ramon shared with his students. “Is Cereal Healthy? The Rise of America’s Most Popular Breakfast“.
Step 5: Final Report
The final step is to create a final draft. In Ramon’s class, due to a few different factors, he completed the final revision of the paper himself.
In addition to the fact that there is science on the GED and there is math in the science on the GED, we have a real opportunity and responsibility to teach and learn science and to explore scientific thinking in our adult education classrooms. Scientific thinking is about building skills to explore and question the world around us, and to help us make decisions, based on facts and evidence. It is a discipline rooted in being human – observing with curiosity, with an eye for patterns and stories. In our modern world, where we are overloaded with unfiltered information, knowing how to approaching things scientifically can help us tell the difference between what is real and what is fake.
Give your students a chance to work together and create a data-based research paper and let us know how it goes in the comments below!
