ERIC Number: EJ1046790
Record Type: Journal
Publication Date: 2014-Dec
Pages: 8
Abstractor: ERIC
ISBN: N/A
ISSN: ISSN-1072-0839
EISSN: N/A
The Oldest Person You've Known
Bush, Sarah B.; Karp, Karen S.; Albanese, Judy; Dillon, Fred
Mathematics Teaching in the Middle School, v20 n5 p278-285 Dec 2014
What better way to interest students in mathematics than using a Super Bowl® commercial? A Prudential® insurance commercial aired during the Super Bowl in 2013 was the impetus for this lesson (see it here on You-Tube™: http://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=IsNiKGMSHUQ). In the commercial, four hundred people were polled on "How Old Is the Oldest Person You've Known?" and each was given a sticker to place on a larger-than-life dot plot marking the age of the oldest person they knew. The authors re-created this activity for sixth-grade and seventh-grade students to engage them in collecting meaningful data, creating organized data displays, and analyzing and interpreting the data to draw generalizations. They also posed a series of questions about measures of central tendency, the shape of data, the interquartile range, absolute mean deviation, representativeness, predictions, and more. The activity was tested in the sixth-grade and seventh-grade classes taught by one of the authors.
Descriptors: Mathematics Instruction, Secondary School Mathematics, Middle School Students, Grade 6, Grade 7, Advertising, Teaching Methods, Data Collection, Data Analysis, Data Interpretation, Creative Teaching, Generalization
National Council of Teachers of Mathematics. 1906 Association Drive, Reston, VA 20191-1502. Tel: 800-235-7566; Tel: 703-620-3702; Fax: 703-476-2970; e-mail: orders@nctm.org; Web site: http://www.nctm.org/publications/
Publication Type: Journal Articles; Guides - Classroom - Teacher; Reports - Descriptive
Education Level: Secondary Education; Middle Schools; Junior High Schools; Grade 6; Intermediate Grades; Elementary Education; Grade 7
Audience: Teachers
Language: English
Sponsor: N/A
Authoring Institution: N/A
Grant or Contract Numbers: N/A