Measuring Performance

I posted a couple of “quizzes” in the last few days that had to do with reading data both with accurate data but with some different ways of presenting it. The responses to the data were generally — non-existent. Now I don’t know if identifying information from a graph isn’t second nature to most people or if people just don’t want to participate. Either way it is interesting as this kind of data is thrown at us as “adults” all of the time but how often do we even question it? When we see news articles presented with a graph do we just accept it as accurate? If we go into a meeting at work and a graph is shown do we just accept that it is accurate? I would hope not, this is something that every adult in the USA encounters and the components of reading and interpreting data and sources have been part of the High School curriculum for many years.

?????To recap those quizzes - the first was interpreting Mass Shootings VS Firearm Availability graphs are all the exact same data but presented in a different way?? Just some simple changes in how it is being displayed.?

? ? The second, The Gun Murder VS Gun Ownership graph comes from a blog post by Author David Epstein, take a few minutes and read the article by David Epstein .?

Every day we are bombarded with data that is “displayed” in a manner that shows what the author wants us to see. We learn the basic tools necessary to analyze this data all through our public education lives - Math (basic statistics is usually learned by 9th grade), Social Studies where we learn of the people in different parts of the world and their cultures and their Histories, Language Arts where we learn to read, write and interpret information in the written form. Where did we learn the skill to combine them all together? Or why wasn’t the skill of combining them not taught??

It should be a standard goal that every HS graduate should be able to analyze and interpret information critically as presented in the news. Beyond a multiple choice test actually seeing if the students can use the information would be a more useful way to assess if a student had reached a level of education that we as a society would deem a part of a HS education.?

How would you go about teaching this to students??

How could you implement something like this in your school creating a cross curriculum functional assessment of students abilities?

Source 1 Source 2 How I manipulated data for the 4 graphs article by David Epstein