Andee
I teach introductory statistics at the university level, and run across the problem you shared as well. I love to tell this story about my 7 year old son interacting with CODAP and the power of data visualization.
While I was home preparing for a lesson recently my son looks over my shoulder and asked what I was doing. I had uploaded data from the World Happiness Report conducted by Gallup poll, that looks at hundreds of countries and evaluates things such as life expectancy, security, trust of government, happiness etc. Here’s a link to a CODAP page showing the 2019 data. I had the graph below pulled up with GDP on the x-axis and life expectancy on the y. He’s never seen scatterplots. But I explained to him loosely how the bottom scored a country’s wealth and the side numbers scored how long they’d live. I asked him what he could say about these countries.
After a moment he uses his finger to make an imaginary circle around the dots between 7 and 9 on the x-axis and 45 to 60 on the y-axis. He said these people don’t have as much money and don’t live as long as these people (draws another circle around the dots from 10 to 12 and 70 to 80 on the x- and y-axes). I then prodded more and he said “well I guess the more money a country makes, they should live longer”. He’s in 1st grade, and he’s got it. Isn’t that what correlation is trying to tell us? I think sometimes our students get bogged down in the data analysis “tool box” they’ve been handed, and often miss the big picture of the story we can tell with the data.
I would love to see what you create with Cliff for young learners. I also teach the math classes for our elementary education majors and love to have things to share with them that they can use in their classes. Plus I love thinking about how young children learn, with those clean, clear minds.