Week 2 summary
David Spiegelhalter and Jenny Gage summarise the key ideas from this week's lesson and look ahead to the final week.
Well that wraps things up for week two. At the start of the week
we talked about multiple representations: the idea that we can represent probability situations in a variety of ways. I hope that you’ve noticed lots of examples as you’ve worked through this week’s materials, and I hope that even if these representations were familiar, using many ways to represent the same problem is an idea that you’d like to try out in your own teaching. I was really surprised as a teacher to discover how I hadn’t really taken on board the fact that these three representations actually all have the same information on them, but in different ways, and for different problems it can be helpful to have the two-way table, or the tree, maybe sometimes the Venn diagram.
Sometimes you’ll be directed to a particular representation by a question. But it’s always helpful to have in mind that perhaps one of the other representations would add something to the problem. Teaching probability can be tough. The problems can be quite complex, and easily become quite abstract. The approaches that we’ve been promoting are all based on the idea of keeping things as practical and transparent as possible, so the students can make the best possible use of their understanding of chance processes. As you did last week, please use the comments for this step to summarise your experience of working through this week’s lesson. What were the new ideas that might have an impact on your teaching?
Congratulations on completing Week 2 of this course!
Next week, we will be focussing on preparing students for examinations. We know that teachers are often under great pressure to get students through examinations, so we’ll be suggesting approaches that can maximise learning while making sure that students reach true understanding of the topic.
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