Heather Barker and Emily Elrod presented their current research at the Association of Mathematics Teacher Educators Conference held in Orlando, Florida on February 8-10th.
The Association of Mathematics Teacher Educators (AMTE) National Conference was held Feb. 8-10 in Orlando, Florida.
AMTE is the largest organization that supports teacher mathematics and statistics education in preparing preservice K-12 teachers to teach. Elon faculty members Heather Barker and Emily Elrod have been members of the organization for many years, and look forward to this conference as a way to reconnect with colleagues and learn about new pedagogy and research for the field of teacher education.
Barker and Elrod presented their current work titled “Data Storytelling in a K-8 Preservice Mathematics Course.” For the last two years, Elrod and Barker have been implementing more statistics standards into a mathematics content course titled Geometry and Data for K-8 Teachers. As part of this implementation, students work on a project where they engage with CODAP (an online statistical software tool) to create a story about data. This gives students an opportunity to engage with statistical storytelling in a way that they may find useful in their own classrooms. The increased implementation in statistics standards has resulted in higher levels of conceptual understanding of statistics for these students. In reviewing the data stories students create, results have shown that these students are doing very well in engaging in different phases of the statistical investigation process.
Barker and Elrod are excited about the positive feedback received from conference attendees, and intend to write a larger manuscript in the future about this work.