Assessment (2008-2009)
French teachers

Polish survey
I was looking forward to receiving the Polish survey because I had never made this activity with students. Are we up to the task?
I feared it was too difficult for our pupils both in English as statistics because I was convinced that the Polish pupils' level was significantly higher than our pupils' level. So I was surprised to read the questionnaire:

• reassured because it was quite accessible to our pupils that the English teacher confirmed later,
• disappointed because I was not able to use the concepts my pupils had studied in the previous month (mean, range, median, quartile) since all issues except one have qualitative data and not quantitative data. So I asked my pupils to write girl-boy on their sheet to diversify the charts later.

Counting
The survey has been counted by some students and the results were published online. I have grouped the data when the distinction girls-boys were not interesting. So then I could differentiate the work requested by the level of my pupils.

Graphs on a sheet
I imposed to all my pupils to draw their graphs first made by hand and then with a spreadsheet. I have once again found that many pupils have difficulties with the percentages. I asked them to check that the sum of all frequencies is equal to 100% and the sum of all the angles is equal to 360°!

Only 2 of 12 pupils had difficulties to draw the simple bar chart. They wrote the size on the x-axis and the frequencies on the y-axis!

Many pupils had difficulties to draw the pie chart because they had no idea how to calculate the angle. Unfortunately too many of them prefered that the teacher told them how to do it then they could well calculate alone.

All pupils who have to draw a pie chart where we could see the boys' answers and the girls' answers had some difficulties. But most of them overcame these difficulties asking help from their teacher. They didn't choose the same way so it was interesting to compare their graphs in the classroom.

Graphs with a spreadsheet
26 élèves sur 28 ont réalisé des graphiques corrects et beaucoup d'entre eux ont été contents d'acquérir de nouvelles compétences en informatique. Je les ai incités à intégrer des graphiques dans le diaporama de leur rapport de stage en entreprise qu'ils doivent rendre début mars.

Au départ, un seul élève avait intégré des images relatives à la question soulevée bien que cela leur avait été demandé. Est-ce de la fainéantise et/ou un manque d'habitude de rendre plus attrayant un exercice de mathématiques ?