Facts In Action

The academic subject of statistics is not what commonly comes to mind when one thinks of preschool curriculum. However, because the principles of statistics underlie many basic learning concepts, statistical principles are easily interwoven into preschool curriculum. A recent report that appeared in The American Statistician describes how the Brigham Young University (BYU) Child and Family Studies Laboratory have incorporated statistical tools and concepts into its curriculum to help children learn to pose and explore questions. Specifically, statistical concepts are used to teach young children to pose hypotheses, define abstract constructs, gather and summarize data, understand variations, and create bar charts.

The BYU early childhood curriculum consists of projects that are student-driven in content and length. BYU educators incorporate statistics in three main ways:

• Question of the Day. At the beginning of each day, children respond to an "either/or" question (such as "do you prefer chocolate or vanilla ice cream?") posed by the teacher by marking their answer in the appropriate column on a sheet of paper. Later at group time, the children and teacher tabulate and interpret the results from the question. The statistical skills used in this activity include posing a question, tabulating responses, and observing variation in responses.

• Survey Work. Children get a chance to collect data during survey work. They are divided into small groups of four or five with a teacher for each group. Each child gets the question, a clipboard, a tally sheet, and a pencil, and they go around the BYU campus and ask university students to answer the question of the day and they record the responses. Through this activity children learn skills including posing questions to increase knowledge, interview skills, testing a survey, interpreting responses, and learning to represent the data appropriately.

• Experiments. The teachers in the BYU classrooms design experiments that the children can safely and successfully perform as independently as possible. Experiments can help children learn to ask questions, form hypotheses, and collect data.

Many of these strategies can be replicated in preschool classrooms and family child care homes. Overall, the study of statistics can be used to creatively support the development and learning of children. Statistics can take advantage of children's natural curiosity and inquisitiveness by providing a context for the acquisition of skills such as literacy, socialization, communication, and mathematics.

Source:
"Statistics in Preschool", S. Hiltion, S. Grimshaw, and G. Anderson, The American Statistician, November 2001.

For more information:
contact Sterling C. Hilton, Professor, Department of Statistics, Bringham Young University, Provo, UT 84602, or by e-mail at hiltons@byu.edu.

Facts in Action, June 2002