Using Technology to Address Diversity in the Classroom - I

Using Technology

to Address

Diversity in the Classroom - I

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Valentina Aguilar, Ph.D. Applied MathematicsDepartment of MathematicsWestern Michigan University

Katya Gallegos, SpecialistTeaching, Learning and Educational StudiesWestern Michigan University

Using Technology To Address Diversity in the Classroom

Introduction Activities for the Classroom Recommendations and

Literature

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Overall Goals of the Module

Use of technology to explore Diversity through mathematical activities in the middle school classroom

Consider practices for promoting inclusive learning environments

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Activity One Goals

Mathematical content Use data to find a linear model Use a linear model to predict values of variables Simple interest Compound interest

Related to diversity Reflect about gender disparities

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Activity Two Goals

• Analyze information using statistical tools appropriate for their grade level

• Use a histogram to summarize and represent data

• Use measures of center and dispersion to analyze data

• Use technology available on the world wide web to represent and analyze data

Activity Three Goals

Goals on mathematical content:– Represent data with a pie chart– Understand categorical data– Use of percentage

Goals on diversity – Reflect about the different compositions of

families– Promote awareness and acceptance of the

different family types

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INTRODUCTION

Mathematics:a tool to understand our Diverse World

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I advise my students to listen carefully the moment they decide to take no more mathematics courses. They might be able to hear the sound of closing doors.

- James Caballero,mathematics teacher and author of ‘A Geometry Game’

Indeed,

mathematics is

an amazing and

powerful tool to

understand the

world around us …

From daily-life routines…

To the wonders of nature and science…

www.ams.org/mathmoments Photo by Jose Luis Gomez de Francisco

Swarm Intelligence, mathematical study of collective behavior …

www.ams.org/mathmoments Photo courtesy of NASA Ames Data Analysis Group

Richardson’s and Kolmogorov’s laws to mathematically explain turbulence in aerodynamics …

www.ams.org/mathmoments Photo courtesy of the Aerospace Corporation

GPS’s functionality derived from arithmetic, algebra and geometry …

www.ams.org/mathmoments Photo courtesy of Christopher Brislawn, Los Alamos National Lab

Wavelets for faster storage and retrieval of FBI’s current fingerprint files: 200,000,000,000,000 bytes!

200,000,000,000,000 bytes!

www.ams.org/mathmoments Photo courtesy of Lloyd Treinish, IBM Research Center.

Forecasting the weather with Mathematical Models…

www.ams.org/mathmoments Photo courtesy of University of Sheffield and Fluent, Inc

Bernoulli’s principle, algebra and geometry to determine the right shape for soccer balls…

Geometry and Music…

Animation …

Math Modeling and Medicine…

Cooking tonight’s dinner …

Planning your next trip …

Saving for retirement … Losing those 10 extra

pounds …

Playing video games with your sister…

And the list goes on and on …

The United States is and has always been a nation of immigrants.

We know that, one way or another, math is part of our own unique life

experience…

And our lives are different because WE are different. We live in a very and increasingly

DIVERSE world.

The following online tool can be used to mathematically exploreimmigration data since 1880.

Move the cursor along the time line to visualize color-

differentiated data in the map.

In this activity, we can look into the changes of immigrant populations in the USA. The

mathematical content may include:

1. Data analysis of the graphic display

2. Interpreting and inferring conclusions from histograms and maps

3. Finding data relationships and equivalent data representations

Let’s start thinking about one of the aspects of diversity:

Gender

We can use this activity to reflect about gender disparities and

increase students’ awareness to promote an equitable

environment in the classroom.

Activity 1: Gender Gap

Observe this graph:

This graph was created using 2005 US Census Bureau data, released for 2006.

Average income ofmen and women in the US

Use the table to reflect:

What is the average income of an Asian female?

What is the average income of an Asian male?

What is the minimum average income among all?

What do you think this chart tells us about women and men? Why do you think there are such differences in income?

What impact in every day life does earning less than other people have?

Add more questions you can ask your students.Click ENTER to continue

Does the gap grow? More specifically, if two people earn different amounts now, how will

this gap change in time?

To study this question, let’s say John and Joanna (both white) save 10% of their average income as stated in the chart in a bank account that pays a fixed rate of 5% simple interest.

How much money will they have in ten years?

Now find the amount each person will have after t years if they deposit their 10% now in a bank that pays 5% simple interest.

See the solution

The equations should beM = 210 t + 4200

andM = 140 t + 2800

respectively for John and Johanna.Graph these two equations on the same Cartesian plane using a line graph applet:

Recommended applet:

http://my.hrw.com/math06_07/nsmedia/tools/Graph_Calculator/graphCalc.html

If you tried to graph the equations, you would notice the graphs do not appear because the coefficients from the equations are large numbers.

There are two solutions for this issue: either change the setting of the graphs and

redefine the ranges of both variables, or change the units involved in the equations.

What units can be used to make the graph easier to visualize?

If we choose one hundred dollars as 1 unit, then the equations are:

M = 1.4t + 28

M = 2.1t + 42

where M is given in hundreds of dollars and t is the number of years.

The applet shows Johanna in red, John in green.

Now answer the questions:

Does the gap grow?

By how much?

See the answer

Now let’s investigate the same question with the more realistic situation of the amounts subject to compound interest.

Given the fact that the mathematical model is different for compound interest and simple interest would you expect that the difference between John and Joanna to stay the same or to be bigger?

The mathematical model is an exponential function of the form

knkrPM /1

Here, M is the amount after n years of depositing P dollars at a rate of r% compounded k times a year. The number of years is the variable n.

Let’s assume that the interest is fixed and it is compounded monthly, that is, k=12. So:

nPnM 1212/05.01)(

The equations for John and Johanna are respectively:

Graph these two equations on the same Cartesian plane using an online graph applet. Recommended applet:

http://my.hrw.com/math06_07/nsmedia/tools/Graph_Calculator/graphCalc.html

12/05.018.2)(

12/05.012.4)(

The applet shows Johanna in red, John in green.

Now, again answer the questions:

Does the gap grow?

By how much?

See the answer

Wrapping up the activity:

Conducting a discussion about gender expectations and stereotyping wraps up this activity. Examples of questions to be asked are:

Are girls good in math and science? Can girls play all sports? Can boys do ballet? How do our own attitudes contribute to fostering an

equitable environment where both boys and girls feel they are treated fairly?

Write other possible questions for such discussion.

Diversity is not only about race or gender; it includes the dimensions of:

Sex Gender identity Sexual orientation Socioeconomic status Abilities and skills Ethnicity

Age Physical attributes Religious beliefs Cultural practices Political affiliation Intellectual ideologies

Multiculturalism is a system of beliefs and behaviors that:

Recognizes and respects the presence of all diverse groups in an organization or society

Acknowledges and values their socio-cultural differences

Encourages and enables their continued contribution within an inclusive cultural context

Empowers everybody within the organization or society

Values cultural differences

Permeates all aspects of school practices, policies and organization

Affirms the pluralism that students, their communities and teachers reflect

Provides the knowledge, dispositions, and skills to promote fair distribution of power and income.

Multicultural Education

Multicultural Education works with school curriculum that directly addresses

issues of

Racism Sexism Classism Linguicism Ablism

Ageism Heterosexism Religious intolerance Xenophobia

Activity 2:THE NAMES IN YOUR

CLASSROOM

The teacher can use this activity to familiarize students’ backgrounds and identify their particular needs that might come from cultural, ethnic, gender or socio-economic situations.

Teachers can include themselves in the activity to build trust within the classroom.

Activity components

• Explore students’ names and their origins and differences - the history of their names.

• Use statistical tools to describe the difference or similitude of students’ names.

• Reflect about what the mathematics tells and how to apply it.

Open a discussion with your class about their names

Your students will take this opportunity to communicate about their homes, parents, siblings, and care givers. Names in many cases reflect cultural background. So the activity provides a time for reflecting on ethnic, gender and race differences. Some names have meanings in English or in other languages.

Engagement

This activity provides a context that engages students (nobody is indifferent to his or her own name) and their curiosity to learn more.

The teacher can talk about his or her name in order to build trust.

Mathematics provides a tool for analyzing similarities and differences in names.

Let’s start

Reflecting about our names is an engaging activity. Each name is personal and usually is linked to family preferences but also reflects ethnic and cultural background. Some names are gender specific; some are not. Some names have meanings in English or in other languages. Explore these issues with your students and you will soon have a lively conversation going. Think about what questions you can ask to the class so cultural and ethnic differences stand out in positive ways.

See suggestions

This is the roster of Mr. Potter’s class: Read the names to yourself and think about what comes to your mind. Do people make judgments after looking at a name?

Look at what social researches think.

Melissa Soledad Cui Mei Jazmin

Teresa Chan Fan DeShaw Sanuthi

Carlos Joel John Aysha Paul

Juan Stephanie Nayanadini Robert Francis

The length of names

Names have many qualities; one of them is the length of the name. The number of letters in a name is the variable that we will use to represent the data.

Now we display the table with the values of the variable “length of names in the list”. Some of the data has been done; please fill in the rest.

9 7 3 3 6

8 4 3 6 7

Length of names in the list

Summarize information using a histogram

• There are many ways to represent numerical data. One of them is a histogram.

• First, we need to construct a frequency table for these data. The range is

10 – 3 = 7. We can decide the number of groups to create. If we want 5 groups, the length of each interval is 7/5 = 1.4.

If we choose 8 groups, the length will be 7/8 = 0.88.

This is the frequency table partially filled. Please complete the missing numbers.

Peek at the answer

3 – 4.4 8

4.4 – 5.8 1

5.8 – 7.2

7.2 – 8.6

8.6 - 10

Use technology to create a histogram

• Explore the resources in your school. Software, like Tinkerplot, lets you create the most common statistical displays.

• Handheld technology.

• The web offers many free applets.

• The following link will lead you to the tool to input the data with no need to create the frequency table.

• Input the data. When you are done, select the interval width by sliding the bar. Set it to 0.88.

Histogram Generator

This is how your histogram should look:

The histogram for the length of names of Mr. Potter’s class

Mean and Standard Deviation

• This site lets you choose the length of the intervals. You can explore the effect of changing the length. Describe the effect in terms of the number of intervals created.

• The tool also gives you the mean - the arithmetical average, computed with the formula

• The standard deviation is a measure of dispersion of the data. It is computed as an average of the “squared” distances from the mean using the formula

Use technology to answer the following questions

• Is the histogram symmetric?

• Does the data have gaps?

• If you change the length of the intervals, does the mean change?

• If you change the length of the intervals, does the median change?

• If you change the length of the intervals, does the deviation change?

Let’s use Tinker Plots to create a box and whiskers plot. Follow the instructions:

• Open a new document in the application.

• From the tool bar, drag a table to your page.

• Where the word new appears, write the categorical variable “name”. A new column will be created next to it. Write “length.”

• Under “name” write all the names from Mr. Potter’s classroom. Under “length” write the number of letters in each name. When you copy the table, a case stack will appear. Each card of the stack represents one data set: a name and the corresponding length.

• From the tool bar, drag a plot to your page. Then select the length attribute and drag it to the horizontal axis of the plot.

•The plot is showing each individual case with a circle icon. Select the length attribute and drag it to the horizontal axis of the plot.•From the tool bar, select separate. Then drag the outermost circle to the edge until there is no separation line (or bins). Click on hat on the toolbar and choose box plot from the hat menu.•Finally, to get rid of the circle icons, for the circle icon menu in the plot, choose hide icons.

Now, think about a situation where a new student with a very long name is added to the list. Add a long name to your table and watch what happens with the box and whiskers plot.

Use technology to answer the following questions

• If a very long name was added to the list, would the mean change?

• If a very long name was added to the list, would the median change?

• Which of the two measures of center is more resistant to changes in the data? Why?

Use the mathematical ideas to come back to the context of the problem and answer the following:

– What measure of center, the mean or the median, would be better for representing the “average” name length of the class?

– Does the “average” tell the whole story about the differences in the names?

– What number of letters would make a name unusually long?

– In what situations would the average length be important to know? Click ENTER to continue

Differentiating the Students´ Abilities

IntelligencePreference

Genderand

Culture

Learning Style

LEARNINGPROFILES

Tomlinson, 2004 “How to differentiate instruction in mixed-ability classrooms”

A. Learning Style

Environmental or personal factors thatinfluence learning results

GroupOrientation

CognitiveStyle

PhysicalEnvironment

1. Group Orientation

• Independent / self-orientation

• Group / peer orientation

• Adult orientation

• Combination

2. Cognitive Style

•creative / conforming •essence / facts •whole-to-part / part-to-whole •expressive / controlled •nonlinear / linear •inductive / deductive •people-oriented / task or object-oriented •concrete / abstract •collaboration / competition •interpersonal / introspective •easily distracted / long attention span •group achievement / personal achievement •oral / visual / kinesthetic

3. Physical Environment

•quiet / noise

•warm / cool

•still / mobile

•flexible / fixed

•“busy” / “spare”

Naturalist

Intrapersonal

Interpersonal

MusicalRhythmic

BodilyKinesthetic

SpatialVisual

LogicalMathematical

VerbalLinguistic

Creative

PracticalAnalytic

B. IntelligencePreference

Applets for different approaches:

Technology provides many tools to implement several representational approaches to a mathematical concept. These representations can fit the cognitive preference of diverse learners. For those students with more developed musical/rhythmical skills, one can use the following applets to let them discover the different mathematical aspects of a linear function:

http://illuminations.nctm.org/ActivityDetail.aspx?ID=36

If we have a student that has a cognitive style that relies on visual activities, the same concept of linear function can be approached with the following tool:http://id.mind.net/~zona/mmts/functionInstitute/linearFunctions/lsif.html

Or open http://science.kennesaw.edu/~plaval/tools/linear.html

If we have a student that has a cognitive style that relies on kinesthetic activities, the same concept of linear function can be approached with the following tool:

http://www.ies.co.jp/math/java/geo/lin_line/lin_line.html

For students that like to find patterns and are capable of easily inducing rules from particular cases, the teacher might provide games like the following:

http://nlvm.usu.edu/en/nav/frames_asid_191_g_4_t_1.html?from=grade_g_4.html

Activity 3:Who is part of the family?

• Use this activity to reflect with the class on how different families can be. • Each family composition brings specific conditions to children.

It is important to acknowledge different family models without the label of necessarily “dysfunctional”.

Start the activity by asking the students to write a small paragraph describing his or her family, or,

Alternatively, the teacher can open a discussion about how family units are composed.

Discuss the categories used by the US Census to classify family members.

Use the following online tool to explore the data about demographics:

http://www.socialexplorer.com/pub/home/home.aspx

Do a query of the household composition in the U.S. Some of the data is included in the following chart. Please complete the information:

Householder 72,261,780

Spouse 55,731,406

Grandchild 5,265,582

Brother or sister

Parent 2,154,713

Other relatives

Nonrelatives

Peek at the answerClick ENTER to continue

Create a chart using, for instance, one of the applets found among the NCTM online resources. The pie chart will look like the graph on the right.

http://illuminations.nctm.org/ActivityDetail.aspx?ID=60

Pose “interpret” type questions such as: Why is the green portion bigger than the blue? What percentages of households have a grandparent

as a householder? Write your own interpret questions.

Pose questions that require further computations like:

What percentage of households consist of a “single”

householder? Write more “derive” type questions.

FINAL RECOMMENDATIONS:

• Honor the diversity of your students: anthropologically, generalizations can be useful to understand common socio- cultural trends, but be careful to avoid stereotyping. There are always differences between individuals.

• Know your students: consider their everyday actual experiences and build confidence through caring.

• Provide opportunities for mathematical discussions: encourage sharing and debate of students’ solutions. Insert new problems and questions connected to their interests.

• Avoid deficit models: value the resources that diverse students bring to the mathematics classroom. Differences can be perceived as opportunities and not necessarily as obstacles and deficiencies.

All this material and more can be read on the MODULE SUMMARY, including a list of Online resources and Bibliography.

Module Reflection

• Consider how you presently incorporate diversity into your mathematics classroom. Compare and contrast your present practices with those discussed in this session.

• Share any favorite diversity applications you currently use with others at this time.

Evaluation

• Write a statement or two that summarized what you have learned during this session.

• What would you like to have added to this session on diversity in the mathematics classroom?

• E-mail your responses for the above to

ruth.a.meyer@wmich.edu

Using Technology to Address Diversity in the Classroom - I

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